Sven Birkerts Quotes

• 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, Reading, Book

  Sven Birkerts (2006). “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”, p.168, Macmillan

  45 Copy quote

• 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

  Sven Birkerts (2006). “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”, p.101, Macmillan

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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.

  Sven Birkerts

  Crush, Book, Self

  Sven Birkerts (2006). “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”, p.189, Macmillan

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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.

  Sven Birkerts

  Believe, Book, Technology

  Sven Birkerts (2006). “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”, p.13, Macmillan

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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.

  Sven Birkerts

  Book, Reading, Years

  Sven Birkerts (2006). “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”, p.100, Macmillan

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

  Sven Birkerts

  Ozone, Soul, Layers

  Sven Birkerts (2006). “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”, p.153, Macmillan

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

  Sven Birkerts

  Mass Culture, Literature, Retreat

  Sven Birkerts (2006). “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”, p.213, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Sven Birkerts

  Book, Matter

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• I read books to read myself.

  Sven Birkerts

  Book

  Sven Birkerts (2006). “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”, p.120, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

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

  Sven Birkerts

  Space, Light, Language

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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.

  Sven Birkerts

  Spring, Communication, Reading

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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.

  Sven Birkerts

  Unique, Radiation, Shots

  Sven Birkerts (2006). “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”, p.138, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• Where am I when I am involved in a book?

  Sven Birkerts

  Book, Involved

  Sven Birkerts (2015). “Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age”, p.153, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

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