Sven Birkerts Quotes

I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.

— Sven Birkerts

“What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny ... the time of reading, the time defined by the author's language resonating in the self, is not the world's time, but the soul's. The energies that otherwise tend to stream outward through a thousand channels of distraction are marshaled by the cadences of the prose; they are brought into focus by the fact that it is an ulterior, and entirely new, world that the reader has entered. The free-floating self
the self we diffusely commune with while driving or walking or puttering in the kitchen
is enlisted in the work of bringing the narrative to life. In the process, we are able to shake off the habitual burden of insufficient meaning and flex our deeper natures.”

— Sven Birkerts

“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

“Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority. More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are such as to keep us hovering in the virtual now, a place away from ourselves.”

— Sven Birkerts

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

Language is the soul's ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.

— Sven Birkerts

I read books to read myself.

— Sven Birkerts

“A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.”

— Sven Birkerts

“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.”

— Sven Birkerts

“A poem is a construction of inner space.
Language is to inner space as light is to material space.”

— Sven Birkerts

“If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.”

— Sven Birkerts

“Where am I when I am involved in a book?”

— Sven Birkerts

The books that matter to me ... are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.

— Sven Birkerts

“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

“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