Top 100 Alberto Manguel Quotes
#1. 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
#2. To lend a book is an incitement to theft.
A Reader on Reading p. 281
Alberto Manguel
#3. Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.
Alberto Manguel
#4. There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.
Alberto Manguel
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
Alberto Manguel
#8. The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.
Alberto Manguel
#9. 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
#10. Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
Alberto Manguel
#11. The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.
Alberto Manguel
#12. As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.
Alberto Manguel
#13. 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
#15. 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
#16. Books are our best possessions in life, they are our immortality.
Alberto Manguel
#17. The Bush administration may, in future years, be remembered 'for bringing peace to the Middle East' (as Condoleezza Rice has pronounced). History may be the mother of truth, but it can also give birth to illegitimate children.
Alberto Manguel
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
Alberto Manguel
#23. Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
Alberto Manguel
#24. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
Alberto Manguel
#29. To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.
Alberto Manguel
#31. 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
#32. We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.
Alberto Manguel
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models ... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.
Alberto Manguel
#36. My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
Alberto Manguel
#37. Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.
Alberto Manguel
#38. the satisfaction of one answer merely leads to asking another question, and so on into infinity.
Alberto Manguel
#39. 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
#41. 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
#42. Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.
Alberto Manguel
#43. I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords.
Alberto Manguel
#45. I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.
Alberto Manguel
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
Alberto Manguel
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts.
Alberto Manguel
#55. 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
#57. 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
#59. Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
Alberto Manguel
#60. As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
Alberto Manguel
#61. Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.
Alberto Manguel
#62. It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.
Alberto Manguel
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#67. In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.
Alberto Manguel
#68. The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
Alberto Manguel
#69. 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
#70. Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.
Alberto Manguel
#71. Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary ...
Alberto Manguel
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.
Alberto Manguel
#75. Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.
Alberto Manguel
#76. A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn't come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.
Alberto Manguel
#77. 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
#78. Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd.
Alberto Manguel
#79. I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.
Alberto Manguel
#80. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
Alberto Manguel
#81. 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
#83. Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.
Alberto Manguel
#84. Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
Alberto Manguel
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
Alberto Manguel
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be
Alberto Manguel
#91. The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that, when I finally decide
to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.
Alberto Manguel
#92. 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
#93. 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
#95. Any library, by its very existence, conjures up its forbidden or forgotten double: an invisible but formidable library of the books that, for conventional reasons of quality, subject matter or even volume, have been deemed unfit for survival under this specific roof.
Alberto Manguel
#96. If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
Alberto Manguel
#97. Every book can be, for the right reader, an oracle, responding on occasion even to questions unasked..
Alberto Manguel
#98. At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book - that string of confused, alien ciphers - shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.
Alberto Manguel
#99. 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
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