Sven Birkerts Quotes
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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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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 we crawl through, returning, once we have wandered, to the very place we started.
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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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Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.
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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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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 value the specific contents.
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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 present, an awareness that can be as ongoing in the soul as the stop-time of trauma.
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I read books to read myself.
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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 has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word.
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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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Where am I when I am involved in a book?
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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 position [in life].
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A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.
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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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