Alberto Manguel Quotes

As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.

When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.

I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords.

Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Darkness promotes speech.

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.

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.

But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.

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.

I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.

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.

The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.

Every text assumes a reader.

Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word.

Evil requires no reason.

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

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.

Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be

Like Petrach's, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I'm grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse the privilege.

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

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.