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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
Helping
Delight
Take
Sake
Years
Losing
Built
Technology
Instruct
Virtue
Vocabulary
Help
Virtues
Common
Thousands

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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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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I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.
Alberto Manguel
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As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.
Alberto Manguel
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I know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of our walk. It is there, it will always be there, and I don't intend to spend my glorious hours looking over my shoulder to see death's icy face.
Alberto Manguel
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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
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If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page.
Alberto Manguel
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The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
Alberto Manguel
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We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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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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One can transform a place by reading in it.
Alberto Manguel
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If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.
Alberto Manguel