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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

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Book
Library
Glittering
Self
Rules
Lit
Window
Replace
Beyond
Windows
Books
Translate
Dark
Closed
Space
Pretend
Shapeless
Universe
Serving
Rows

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For Borges, the core of reality lay in books reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.
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The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.
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At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.... The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.
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But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
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One can transform a place by reading in it.
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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.
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If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
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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.
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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.
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From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
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During the day, the library is a realm of order.
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In the light, we read the inventions of others in the darkness we invent our own stories.
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This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.
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Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
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The telling of stories creates the real world.
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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.
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As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic tracts. Revenge - bloodthirsty, justice-hungry revenge - is the very essence of romance, lying at the heart of much of the best fiction.
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Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
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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.
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Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.
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