Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Whole
Meaning
Confused
Alien
Reader
Page
Spokes
Secret
Instant
Magical
Moment
Pages
Spoke
Shivered
Universe
Became
Aliens
Ciphers
Words
Childhood
Strings
Irrevocably
Moments
Gave
Opened
Universes
Book
Early
Secrets
String

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

Image
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
Image
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.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Evil requires no reason.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
Alberto Manguel
Image
I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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
Image
In the light, we read the inventions of others in the darkness we invent our own stories.
Alberto Manguel
Image
When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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.
Alberto Manguel