Quote

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

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
Books
Translate
Dark
Closed
Space
Pretend
Shapeless
Universe
Serving
Rows
Book
Library
Glittering
Self
Rules
Lit
Window
Replace
Beyond
Windows

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

Image
Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.
Alberto Manguel
Image
There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified find that line, and immortality is assured.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In the light, we read the inventions of others in the darkness we invent our own stories.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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
Image
I wanted to live among books.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Evil requires no reason.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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
Image
The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Every text assumes a reader.
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
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?
Alberto Manguel
Image
The world that is a book is devoured bya reader who is a letter in the world's text thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading We are what we read.
Alberto Manguel
Image
At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
Alberto Manguel