The books that matter to me. . . are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books … - Sven Birkerts

Same topic Authors

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Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.

Sven Birkerts

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

Book, Books, Galvanize, Matter, Read

Same Author Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Language, Layer, Layers, Ozone, Soul, Souls

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Bernardo Bertolucci

Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.

Instinct, Sometimes, Think, Thinking, Understand

Cyril Connolly

Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.

Atheism, Belief, Christian, Paralyses, Poison, Poisons

Robert Graves

Never use the word 'audience. ' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.

Writing, Talking, Ideas, Audience, Word

Ronald Reagan

Cold, hungry, scared as hell inside, but too damn brave to admit it.

Brave, Catchy, Cold, Hell, Hungry, Scared

Robert Pattinson

I aspire to be Jack Nicholson. I love his every single mannerism. I used to try and be him in virtually everything I did, I don't know why. I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest when I was about 13, and I dressed like him. I tried to do his accent. I did everything like him. I think it kind of stuck with me.

Accent, Acting, Careers, Everything, Love, Thinking