Quotes from 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.

This "domination by the author" has been, at least until now, the point of writing and reading. The author masters the resources of language to create a vision that will engage and in some way overpower the reader; the reader goes to the work to be subjected to the creative will of another.

I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.

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.

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

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.

To read, when one does so of one's own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and to set off toward it.

It is in adolescence that most of us grasp that life--our own life--is a problem to be solved, that a set of personal unknowns must now be factored together with the frightening variables of experience. The future suddenly appears--it is the space upon which the answers will be inscribed.

I read novels to indulge in a concentrated and directed inner activity that parallels -- and thereby tunes up, accentuates -- my own inner life.

Sometimes I think that the long-term work of reading is to discover one by one, the books that hold the scattered elements of our nature, after which the true consummation can begin. We undertake the gradual focused exploration, nuance by nuance, of their meanings, their implications; we follow out the strands that mysteriously connect the words of another with the unformulated stuff of the self.

Just to see my books, to note their presence, their proximity to other books, fills me with a sense of futurity.

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

If literature is to survive, to gain back some of the power it has ceded to terrorists and newsmakers of all descriptions, it must become dangerous.

We never know, do we, if the future is just more of the present pushed forward, or whether the look and feel, not to mention the fundamental essence of life might not be changing

Imagination is linked as much to an awareness of the insufficiency of the world as we find it as it is to fantasy; it grows from a desire to assert contrary or alternative worlds in the face of the given.

Attention paid to the life, to the fact of life, to events and people, their enormous mattering--all the things that could not be more obvious when we're brought awake, but that really do get slurred away by distraction, sometimes for long periods, so that when the feeling does come back again, it seems like something that needs to be marked, sewn a la Blaise Pascal right into the lining of your coat--where you will always see it and remember

A man who never asks himself any questions had better not try asking others. In the centre of his being a teacher should have a sense of justice and a great capacity for dejection. Teachers in a place like this, where education is taken seriously, should always bear in mind that they are the central problem, that we would provide the students with a liberal education if we merely gave them the privilege of looking on while we educated ourselves

It sounds so good: the futurism of The Jetsons meets the self-actualization of Abraham Maslow.

The primary material conditions for the making of beauty have not changed. But the frame of attention, and the context of mattering—these have.

The new dispensation—near-perfect retrievability—reorients us, not so subtly altering our expectations and our way of encountering our reality. It feeds the great illusion of our competence, our mastery, even as it pampers us and gives us a sense of being catered to (the psychological implication being that we're worthy). These new assumptions