The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself. — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world. — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture. — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
“I read novels to indulge in a concentrated and directed inner activity that parallels -- and thereby tunes up, accentuates -- my… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
“I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
“...a novel for me is a pretext, a way of starting up and sustaining a complicated and many layered inner exchange, a… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
“What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments,… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
Poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication[Poetry] mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensification of language via rhythm,… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
“It is in adolescence that most of us grasp that life--our own life--is a problem to be solved, that a set of personal unknowns… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
“What reading does...is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not sequenced of lived moments, but a destiny.” — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now. — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one's essential… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
“Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority. More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space. — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny. — Sven Birkerts Copy Share Image
![“Poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication[Poetry] mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensification of language via rhythm, syntax, image and metaphor. Reading it-the best of it-can create another, very different kind of perpetual present, an…” quote by Sven Birkerts](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/c57/sven-birkerts-25191_awareness_poetry-springs-directly-from-our-primal_206738.jpg)
![“To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one's essential position [in life].” quote by Sven Birkerts](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/4ba/sven-birkerts-25191_achieve_to-achieve-deep-focus-nowadays-is-also-t_1097210.jpg)
