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Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. 'They'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

In the books by Ruy-Sanchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay of what they are made. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breaths through the erotic. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Only when, years later, I touched for the first time my lover's body did I realize that literature could sometimes fall short of the actural event. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

I've never really understood attachment to a place for reasons of birth. That my mother happened to give birth to me in a certain place doesn't, to my mind, justify any thankfulness towards that place. It could have been anywhere. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

The categories that a reader brings to a reading, and the categories in which that reading itself is placed - the learned social and political categories, and the physical categories into which a library is divided - constantly modify one another in ways that appear, over the years, more or less arbitrary or more or less imaginative. Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Sartre, in his memoirs, confessed to much the same experience. Like Plato, I passed from knowledge to its subject. I found more reality in the idea than in the thing because it was given to me first and because it was given for a thing. It was in books that I encountered the universe: digested, classified, labelled, mediated, still formidable. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

During the day, the library is a realm of order. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Partly, what we are may be what we believe we once were and lost. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder ... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us
the recognition of something we never knew was there ... — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Ancient Egypt 1300BC
Be a scribe! Engrave this in your heart
So that your name might live on like theirs!
The scroll is better than the carved stone.
A man has died: his corpse is dust,
And his people have passed from the land.
It is a book that makes him be remembered
In the mouth of the speaker who reads him. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader's hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Each technology has its own merits, and therefore it may be more useful to leave aside this crusading view of the electronic word vanquishing the printed one and explore instead each technology according to its particular merits. Perhaps — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

I know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of our walk. It is there, it will always be there, and I don't intend to spend my glorious hours looking over my shoulder to see death's icy face. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now there's still this idea that the reader doesn't take part in the social game and in politics, the res publica, but for other reasons: he doesn't do it because he's not making any money. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Books are our best possessions in life, they are our immortality. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Deadlines comes as a surprise ... superb: a new genre, in fact, combining the pleasures of list-making with that of last-minute eaves-dropping. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God's creatures, ordered alphabetically or by numbers or by the language in which the text is written, every library translates the chaos of discovery and creation into a structured system of hierarchies or a rampage of free associations. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again; we can learn from its splendid ambition that what was one man's experience can become, through the alchemy of words, the experience of all, and how that experience, distilled once again into words, can serve each singular reader for some secret, singular purpose. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

This is the paradox presented by every general library: that if, to a lesser or greater extent, it intends to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive as possible a record of the world, then ultimately its task must be redundant, since it can only be satisfied when the library's borders coincide with those of the world itself. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

A book brings its own history to the reader. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

I soon discovered that one doesn't simply read Crime and Punishment or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. One reads a certain edition, a specific copy, recognizable by the roughness or the smoothness of its paper, by its scent, by a slight tear on page 72 and a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of the back cover. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

I remember, as a child, the confusion of not knowing what this place was where I was supposed to spend the night: it's a disquieting experience for a child. And what I would do was quickly unpack my books and go back to a book I knew well and make sure the same text and the same illustrations were there. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror
at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance
and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Every book can be, for the right reader, an oracle, responding on occasion even to questions unasked.. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Paolo and Francesca were not ideal readers since they confess to Dante that after the first kiss they read no more. Ideal readers would have kissed and then read on. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

To say "I" is to draw a circle in which writer and reader share a common existence within the margins of the page, where reality and unreality rub off each other, where words and what the words name contaminate each other. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Life happened because I turned the pages. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

To lend a book is an incitement to theft.
A Reader on Reading p. 281 — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary ... — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

The world that is a book is devoured bya reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading; We are what we read. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Few of us, however, have Alice's courage, at the end of the book, to stand up (literally)for our convictions and refuse to hold our tongue. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Libraries, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic. - The Library at Night — Alberto Manguel

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One can transform a place by reading in it. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt; we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation; forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic tracts. Revenge - bloodthirsty, justice-hungry revenge - is the very essence of romance, lying at the heart of much of the best fiction. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

We can live in a society founded on the book and yet not read, or we can live in a society where the book is merely an accessory and be, in the deepest, truest sense, a reader. — Alberto Manguel

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I wanted to live among books. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Then one day, from the window of a car (the destination of that journey is now forgotten), I saw a billboard by the side of the road. The sight could not have lasted very long; perhaps the car stopped for a moment, perhaps it slowed down long enough for me to see, large and looming shapes similar to those in my book, but shapes that I had never seen before. and yet, all of a sudden, I knew what they were; I heard them in my head, they metamorphosed from black lines and white spaces into a solid, sonourous, meangingful reality. I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing ourselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could turn bare lines into a living reality, I was all-poweful. i could read. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings < ... > This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had 'walked over our grave,' as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us - the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading
once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive
is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good. — Alberto Manguel

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The starting point is a question. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library. — Alberto Manguel

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At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Cataloguing is an ancient profession; there are examples of such "ordainers of the universe" (as they were called by the Sumerians) among the oldest vestiges of libraries. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

the satisfaction of one answer merely leads to asking another question, and so on into infinity. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters. — Alberto Manguel

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All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone. — Alberto Manguel

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The web will not be the container of our cosmopolitan past, like a book, because it is not a book and will never be a book, in spite of the endless gadgets and guises invented to force it into that role. — Alberto Manguel

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Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine. — Alberto Manguel

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I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

It is likely that libraries will carry on and survive, as long as we persist in lending words to the world that surrounds us, and storing them for future readers. — Alberto Manguel

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Darkness promotes speech. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

The power of readers lies not in their ability to gather information, in their ordering and cataloguing capability, but in their gift to interpret, associate and transform their reading. — Alberto Manguel

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From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story. — Alberto Manguel

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The telling of stories creates the real world. — Alberto Manguel

Manguel Alberto Quotes By Alberto Manguel

Outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose. And yet, with bewildering optimism, we continue to assemble whatever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf, whether material, virtual or otherwise, pathetically intent on lending the world a semblance of sense and order, while knowing perfectly well that, however much we'd like to believe the contrary, our pursuits are sadly doomed to failure. — Alberto Manguel

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Instead, I practiced different forms of reading. The possibilities offered by books are legion. The solitary relationship of a reader with his or her books breaks into dozens of further relationships: with friends upon whom we urge the books we like, with booksellers (the few who have survived in the Age of Supermarkets) who suggest new titles, with strangers for whom we might compile an anthology. As we read and reread over the years, these activities multiply and echo one another. A book we loved in our youth is suddenly recalled by someone to whom it was long ago recommended, the reissue of a book we thought forgotten makes it again new to our eyes, a story read in one context becomes a different story under a different cover. Books enjoy this modest kind of immortality. — Alberto Manguel

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The thing is, I don't know if these stories he was telling were mine, or his, or someone else's. You spend your life among words, listening, making sense out of what you say and out of what you imagine other people are saying to you, believing that something in particular happened like this or that, as a result of this or that, with these or those consequences. But it is never so simple, is it? I suppose that if we read about ourselves in a book, we wouldn't recognize ourselves, we wouldn't realize that those people doing certain things and behaving in a particular manner are us. I always believed that I knew Alejandro, that I knew him intimately, I mean, the way you might know a doll you've once taken to pieces. But it wasn't true. — Alberto Manguel

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The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself. — Alberto Manguel

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Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence. — Alberto Manguel

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The point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years ago and of which we know nothing; every reading projects its shadow onto the following page, lending it content and context. In this way, the story grows, layer after layer, like the skin of the society whose history this act preserves. — Alberto Manguel

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Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know. — Alberto Manguel