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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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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Tell
Passages
Hands
Readers
Stories
Reader
Book
Fire
Time
Hand
Neglectful
Books
Censor
Story
Escaped
Water
Passage

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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In the light, we read the inventions of others in the darkness we invent our own stories.
Alberto Manguel
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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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At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
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The telling of stories creates the real world.
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Life happened because I turned the pages.
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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
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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.
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Digestion of words as well I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.
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One can transform a place by reading in it.
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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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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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In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.
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Evil requires no reason.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
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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As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic tracts. Revenge - bloodthirsty, justice-hungry revenge - is the very essence of romance, lying at the heart of much of the best fiction.
Alberto Manguel
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The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
Alberto Manguel
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A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
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Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.
Alberto Manguel