Alberto Manguel quotes - page 3

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices. (Alberto Manguel)
Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Alberto Manguel
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. View quote
Alberto Manguel
I remember, as a child, the confusion of not knowing what this place was where I was supposed to spend the night: it's a disquieting experience for a child. And what I would do was quickly unpack my books and go back to a book I knew well and make sure the same text and the same illustrations were there. View quote
Alberto Manguel
I wanted to live among books. View quote
Alberto Manguel
Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons. View quote
Alberto Manguel
But a reader's ambition knows no bounds. View quote
Alberto Manguel
Darkness promotes speech. View quote
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've never really understood attachment to a place for reasons of birth. That my mother happened to give birth to me in a certain place doesn't, to my mind, justify any thankfulness towards that place. It could have been anywhere. View quote
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. View quote
Alberto Manguel
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. View quote
Alberto Manguel
Possessing these books has become all important to me, because I have become jealous of the past. View quote
Alberto Manguel
From its very start, reading is writings apotheosis. View quote
Alberto Manguel
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. Those books may no longer be available for consultation, they may exist only in the vague memory of a reader or in the vaguer-still memory of tradition and legend, but they have acquired a kind of immortality. View quote
Alberto Manguel
A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn't come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages. View quote
Alberto Manguel
I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it. View quote
Alberto Manguel
We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written. View quote
Alberto Manguel
It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now there's still this idea that the reader doesn't take part in the social game and in politics, the res publica, but for other reasons: he doesn't do it because he's not making any money. (Alberto Manguel)
In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art. View quote
Alberto Manguel
I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library. View quote
Alberto Manguel