Top 113 Quotes & Sayings by Alberto Manguel - Page 2

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.

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.... The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.

It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.

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

I know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of our walk. It is there, it will always be there, and I don't intend to spend my glorious hours looking over my shoulder to see death's icy face.

In the books by Ruy-Sanchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay of what they are made. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breaths through the erotic.

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.

A book brings its own history to the reader.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Evil requires no reason.

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.

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

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?

I wanted to live among books.

Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.

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.

Without Leskov there would be no Bulgakov, no Chekhov, but also no Garca Mrquez and Julio Cortzar. . . . Leskov is the essential storyteller: he does not portray life, he creates it in all its wonder and terror and magic.

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.

As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.

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.

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

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.

Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned.

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

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.

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

This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.

Our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged

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

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

Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.

But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.

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.

Every text assumes a reader.

As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt; we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation; forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic tracts. Revenge - bloodthirsty, justice-hungry revenge - is the very essence of romance, lying at the heart of much of the best fiction.

A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.

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

Darkness promotes speech.

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