Top 10 Sven Birkerts Quotes
#1. If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.
Sven Birkerts
#2. A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.
Sven Birkerts
#3. A poem is a construction of inner space.
Language is to inner space as light is to material space.
Sven Birkerts
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Language is the soul's ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.
Sven Birkerts
#10. The books that matter to me ... are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.
Sven Birkerts
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top