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Rhythm Quotes by Sven Birkerts

2 Rhythm quotes by Sven Birkerts

All Rhythm quotes Sven Birkerts’s page

Sven Birkerts writes with a cadence that mirrors the rhythm of language itself, turning each line into a pulse that readers can feel. The excerpts compiled here showcase his ability to weave musical timing into prose, offering a subtle reminder that the beat of a sentence can shape thought as much as any melody.

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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…

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Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don't…

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More by Sven Birkerts

I read books to read myself.

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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,…

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“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…

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“What reading does...is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not sequenced of lived moments, but a destiny.”

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I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet…

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Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now.

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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…

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Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I…

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Where am I when I am involved in a book?

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“Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority. More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are…

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A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space.

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What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.

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“I read novels to indulge in a concentrated and directed inner activity that parallels -- and thereby tunes up, accentuates -- my own inner…

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If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

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The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.

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