“Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority. More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are such as to keep us hovering in the virtual now, a place away from ourselves.” — 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
“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
“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
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
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
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
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
“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
A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space. — Sven Birkerts Copy Share
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
“I read novels to indulge in a concentrated and directed inner activity that parallels -- and thereby tunes up, accentuates -- my own inner… — Sven Birkerts Copy Share
If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture. — Sven Birkerts Copy Share
The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself. — Sven Birkerts Copy Share
