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
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
