14 Quotes by Sven Birkerts

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

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.

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.

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

Where am I when I am involved in a book?