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A library is an ever-growing entity it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.

Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Library
Suggesting
Growing
Theft
Multiples
Ever
Demanding
Reproduces
Entity
Unaided
Gaps
Purchase
Sorts
Completion
Association
Borrowing
Gifts
Seemingly

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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Darkness promotes speech.
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As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.
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But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.
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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.
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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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I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.
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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.
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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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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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The starting point is a question.
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Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.
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Life happened because I turned the pages.
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Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
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At different times and in different places I have come to expect certain books to look a certain way, and, as in all fashions, these changing features fix a precise quality onto a book's definition. I judge a book by its cover I judge a book by its shape.
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I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.
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Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.
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The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
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The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
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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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