I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true … - Sven Birkerts

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A captivating moment was when I realized that people, including myself, were not saying, “I just bought an item on eBay. ” They were saying, “I just won an item on eBay. ” It was the thrill of the hunt. I bought a car on eBay.

Sven Birkerts

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

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

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

Language, Layer, Layers, Ozone, Soul, Souls

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.

Book, Reading, Specific, Years