Alberto Manguel Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Life happened because I turned the pages.

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

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.

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.

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

Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.

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

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.

The starting point is a question.

A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.

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.

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

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

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

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

Reading is at the beginning of the social contract.

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

One can transform a place by reading in it.

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.

The telling of stories creates the real world.

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

A book brings its own history to the reader.

Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I wanted to live among books.