Alberto Manguel Quotes
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A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
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Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords.
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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.
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I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometric progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.
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A book brings its own history to the reader.
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Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.
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One can transform a place by reading in it.
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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.
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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.
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Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
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As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.
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Possessing these books has become all important to me, because I have become jealous of the past.
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Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.
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The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.
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Every text assumes a reader.
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As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
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In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.
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'reading is at the beginning of the social contract'
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To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.
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I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.