quotes by Alberto Manguel

"At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book--that string of confused, alien ciphers--shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader."
— Alberto Manguel

"Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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 (The Library at Night)

"I soon discovered that one doesn't simply read Crime and Punishment or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. One reads a certain edition, a specific copy, recognizable by the roughness or the smoothness of its paper, by its scent, by a slight tear on page 72 and a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of the back cover. "
— Alberto Manguel (A History of Reading)

"Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"I wanted to live among books."
— Alberto Manguel (A History of Reading)

"In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Unpacking books is a revelatory activity. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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 (The Library at Night)

"I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books."
— Alberto Manguel (A History of Reading)

"Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge."
— Alberto Manguel (A History of Reading)

"In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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 (The Library at Night)

"Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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 (The Library at Night)

"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."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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 (The Library at Night)

"Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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 (The Library at Night)

"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."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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 (The Library at Night)

"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 (The Library at Night)

"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"
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons."
— Alberto Manguel (A History of Reading)

"One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"But a reader's ambition knows no bounds."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Darkness promotes speech."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"The starting point is a question."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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 (The Library at Night)

"Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Evil requires no reason."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

""Only when, years later, I touched for the first time my lover's body did I realize that literature could sometimes fall short of the actural event.""
— Alberto Manguel

"During the day, the library is a realm of order."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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 (The Library at Night)

"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 (The Library at Night)

"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. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)