Alberto Manguel Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Alberto Manguel

  Reading, Book, Rebirth

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.31, Vintage Canada

  47 Copy quote

• 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

  Beautiful, Book, Fate

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Darkness, Return

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “A Reading Diary”, p.66, Vintage Canada

  18 Copy quote

• The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Reading, Thought Provoking

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.9, Vintage Canada

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Confused, Book, Childhood

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Alberto Manguel (2006). “With Borges”, Telegram Books

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Book, Home

  "Conversation: Alberto Manguel". "PBS NewsHour" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. February 19, 2010.

  7 Copy quote

• One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Creating, Different

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.19, Vintage Canada

  7 Copy quote

• To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, World, Crafts

  "A History of Reading". Book by Alberto Manguel, 1996.

  10 Copy quote

• The telling of stories creates the real world.

  Alberto Manguel

  Real, Stories, World

  3 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Voice, Space

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.19, Vintage Canada

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Reading, Crafts, Crowds

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Dark, Space

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.17, Vintage Canada

  9 Copy quote

• Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.

  Alberto Manguel

  Library, Exclusion, Preference

  "A History of Reading". Book by Alberto Manguel, 1996.

  8 Copy quote

• Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Reading, World

  Alberto Manguel (2014). “A History of Reading”, p.27, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Space, Darkness

  "A History of Reading". Book by Alberto Manguel, 1996.

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Lines, Fables, Justified

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.30, Vintage Canada

  3 Copy quote

• The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.

  Alberto Manguel

  Wall, Book, Reflection

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.175, Vintage Canada

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Stars, Memories, Leaving

  6 Copy quote

• Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Humorous, Creating

  "A History of Reading". Book by Alberto Manguel, 1996.

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Reading, Self, Lust

  10 Copy quote

• Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

  Alberto Manguel

  Library, Shade, Absence

  7 Copy quote

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

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Association, Reader

  "A History of Reading". Book by Alberto Manguel, 1996.

  6 Copy quote

• If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence; the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything.

  Alberto Manguel

  Ambition, Library, Alexandria

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alberto Manguel

  Dream, Engineering, Law

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.10, Vintage Canada

  3 Copy quote

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