Sven Birkerts Quotes

#1. Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.

Michel De Montaigne

#2. Obviously the shift to gas and the need for large amounts of gas in the United States is going to be a major focus of attention on the part of producers.

Andrew Gould

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

Sven Birkerts

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

Sven Birkerts

#5. All art, from the paintings on the walls of cave dwellers to art created today, is autobiographical because it comes from the secret place in the soul where imagination resides.

Gloria Vanderbilt

#6. A poem is a construction of inner space.
Language is to inner space as light is to material space.

Sven Birkerts

#7. Where am I when I am involved in a book?

Sven Birkerts

#8. 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

#9. Peace is so beneficial that the word itself is pleasant to hear.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#10. I want you inside me," he said simply ... "I will beg you for it if you order me to. And I'll beg you for it even if you don't.

Tiffany Reisz

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Sven Birkerts

#14. I read books to read myself.

Sven Birkerts

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

Sven Birkerts