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Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Hold
Shades
Within
Haunted
Libraries
Shade
Absence
Library
Writers
Worked
Deserted

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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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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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 always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.
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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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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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Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
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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 is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.
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The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
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But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
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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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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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I never talked to anyone about my reading the need to share came afterwords.
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It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.
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In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.
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In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.
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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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Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary.
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I wanted to live among books.
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