Sven Birkerts Quotes
What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.
A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.
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.
A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space.
If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.
The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.
Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now.
