Alberto Manguel, The Library At Night Quotes

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

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

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

If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.

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.

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

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.

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.

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.

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.

Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

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

In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.

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.

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.

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

During the day, the library is a realm of order.

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

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.

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.

Darkness promotes speech.

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.

But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.

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.

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.

Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts.

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.

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

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