Alberto Manguel - Read Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
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
We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reacher, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles—a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.

Alberto Manguel
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.

Alberto Manguel
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
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.

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

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

Alberto Manguel