Quote

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

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
Space
Book
Exceeds
Always
Exceed
Granted
Ultimately
Number
Numbers

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

Image
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
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
Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Without Leskov there would be no Bulgakov, no Chekhov, but also no Garca Mrquez and Julio Cortzar. . . . Leskov is the essential storyteller: he does not portray life, he creates it in all its wonder and terror and magic.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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.
Alberto Manguel
Image
The telling of stories creates the real world.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.
Alberto Manguel
Image
We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Life happened because I turned the pages.
Alberto Manguel
Image
A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
Alberto Manguel
Image
The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
Alberto Manguel
Image
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.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
Alberto Manguel
Image
All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary.
Alberto Manguel
Image
I never talked to anyone about my reading the need to share came afterwords.
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
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
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.
Alberto Manguel