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At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.

Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
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Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Ghost
Library
Voice
Night
Ghosts
Voices

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian.
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Life happened because I turned the pages.
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I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. ‘They'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said.
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We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.
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Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.
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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.
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If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything.
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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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Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
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I never talked to anyone about my reading the need to share came afterwords.
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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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Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.
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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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Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary.
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In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.
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Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
Alberto Manguel
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In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
Alberto Manguel
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Deadlines comes as a surprise....superb: a new genre, in fact, combining the pleasures of list-making with that of last-minute eaves-dropping.
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I know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of our walk. It is there, it will always be there, and I don't intend to spend my glorious hours looking over my shoulder to see death's icy face.
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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.
Alberto Manguel