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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

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
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Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Reader
Vision
Upon
Order
Imposed
Certain
Entering
Way
Categories
Always
Stuck
World
Library

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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.
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Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.
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One can transform a place by reading in it.
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I never talked to anyone about my reading the need to share came afterwords.
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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.
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Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they 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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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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In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.
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Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.
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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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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.
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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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One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
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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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Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God's creatures, ordered alphabetically or by numbers or by the language in which the text is written, every library translates the chaos of discovery and creation into a structured system of hierarchies or a rampage of free associations.
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The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
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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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Reading is at the beginning of the social contract.
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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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