Quote by Sven Birkerts

“To read, when one does so of one's own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and to set off toward it.” quote by Sven Birkerts — Download Open image

““To read, when one does so of one's own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and to set off toward it.””

Sven Birkerts

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More by Sven Birkerts

I read books to read myself.

Sven Birkerts

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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,…

Sven Birkerts

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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.”

Sven Birkerts

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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 given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author…

Sven Birkerts

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

Sven Birkerts

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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…

Sven Birkerts

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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 just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity. The printed page becomes a kind of wrought-iron fence…

Sven Birkerts

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

Sven Birkerts

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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…

Sven Birkerts