Poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication[Poetry] mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensificatio…

- Sven Birkerts

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

- Sven Birkerts

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

- Sven Birkerts

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

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

- Sven Birkerts

I read books to read myself.

- Sven Birkerts

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

- Sven Birkerts

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…

- Sven Birkerts

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