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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

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Years
Losing
Built
Technology
Instruct
Virtue
Vocabulary
Help
Virtues
Common
Thousands
Helping
Delight
Take
Sake

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.
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Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.
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In the books by Ruy-Sanchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay of what they are made. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breaths through the erotic.
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I wanted to live among books.
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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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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.
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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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Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
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I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.
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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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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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As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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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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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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Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
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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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When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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Reading is at the beginning of the social contract.
Alberto Manguel