Sven Birkerts Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“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.”
-- Sven Birkerts

#Dream #Book #Reading
“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

#Reading #Destiny #Ideas
“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.”
-- Sven Birkerts

#Book #Reading #Years
“The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.”
-- Sven Birkerts

#Book #Matter
“Where am I when I am involved in a book?”
-- Sven Birkerts

#Book
“Language is the soulâ€™s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.”
-- Sven Birkerts

#Ozone #Soul #Layers
“Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. â€˜Thereâ€™ was then; â€˜hereâ€™ is now.”
-- Sven Birkerts

#Unique #Radiation #Shots
“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.”
-- Sven Birkerts

#Spring #Communication #Reading
“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].”
-- Sven Birkerts

#Blow #Self #Focus

Sven Birkerts Quote A Book Is Solitude Privacy It Is A Way Of Holding The Self

Sven Birkerts Quote What Reading Does Ultimately Is Keep Alive The Dangerous And

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