Sven Birkerts Quotes

9 quotes in 170 categories

• 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…
• If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I…
• The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.
• Where am I when I am involved in a book?
• Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.
• Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now.
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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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