Alberto Manguel Short Quotes

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Reading is at the beginning of the social contract

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alberto Manguel
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.

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

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

Alberto Manguel
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.

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 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
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.

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
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
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
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
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
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.

Alberto Manguel