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Sven Birkerts Biography

Sven Birkerts (born September 21, 1951) is an American essayist and literary critic of Latvian ancestry. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture."

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Sven Birkerts Quotes

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.

Book, Reading, Specific, Years

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

Language, Layer, Layers, Ozone, Soul, Souls

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.

Destiny, Ideas, Keep, Moments, Reading, Sequence

I read books to read myself.

Book, Books, Read

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

Book, Involved

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

Book, Books, Galvanize, Matter, Read

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

Construction, Language, Light, Material, Space

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].

Blow, Focus, Position, Self, Strengthened

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.

Awareness, Communication, Metaphor, Primal, Reading, Spring

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.

Book, Dream, Meditative, Reading, Vicinity

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.

Believe, Book, Elsewhere, Language, Technology, Unregenerate

Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now.

Radiation, Shot, Shots, Strangely, Unique

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

Culture, Literature, Mass Culture, Refuse, Retreat

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

Apart, Book, Crush, Holding, Self, World