Alberto Manguel Quotes
Alberto Manguel Quotes
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.
4460 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.
3975 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.
1624 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.
4810 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.
4691 Life happened because I turned the pages.
3267 In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.
2236 We read to understand our intuition of the world, to discover that someone a thousand miles and years away has put into words our most intimate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a collaborative act.
2289 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.
4573 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.
4045 The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
4628 Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
4902 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.
3475 If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
2573 I wanted to live among books.
4322 Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
2373 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.
1667 Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
1398 Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
2292 In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian.
3476 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.
4292 Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
3968 Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
3889 Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.
2389 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.
3392 But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.
1503 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.
3932 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.
2892 In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
1858 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.
2569 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.
4204 One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
3631 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.
2267 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.
4699 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.
4195 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.
1369 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.
4741 Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts.
1665 ...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.
2301 اعطتني القراءة عذرًا مقبولًا لعزلتي، بل ربما اعطت مغزىً لتلك العزلة المفروضة عليّ
4853 But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
4319 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.
1745 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.
3549 Hinter dem westlichen Konzept einer Idealstadt verbirgt sich die Idee der Privilegierung. Moreau hätte ihm ohne Zweifel zugestimmt.
4915 Lesen ist eine Erinnerungsarbeit, bei der wir durch Geschichten in den Genuss der vergangenen Erfahrungen anderer kommen, als wären es unsere eigenen.
3234 Alberto Manguel At Amazon