Sven Birkerts - The Gutenberg Elegies (1994)

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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.

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

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

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

Sven Birkerts