Alberto Manguel Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Alberto Manguel
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.

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

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

Alberto Manguel
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.

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

Alberto Manguel
From its very start, reading is writings apotheosis.

Alberto Manguel
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
Possessing these books has become all important to me, because I have become jealous of the past.

Alberto Manguel
Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.

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

Alberto Manguel
The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.

Alberto Manguel
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
At different times and in different places I have come to expect certain books to look a certain way, and, as in all fashions, these changing features fix a precise quality onto a book's definition. I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape.

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

Alberto Manguel
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.

Alberto Manguel
Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature.

Alberto Manguel
Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something not exactly defined by the word "text" unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root as I read. But how does this process take place?

Alberto Manguel
The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing.

Alberto Manguel
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
I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing themselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could bare lines into living reality, I was all powerful. I could read.

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

Alberto Manguel
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.

Alberto Manguel
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.

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

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

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

Alberto Manguel
Reading is at the beginning of the social contract

Alberto Manguel