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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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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Funny
Snow
Letters
Realize
Humor
Realizing
Came
Four
Letter
Word
Canada

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
Alberto Manguel
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Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
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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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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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.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
Alberto Manguel
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Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.
Alberto Manguel
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Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.
Alberto Manguel
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In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.
Alberto Manguel
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During the day, the library is a realm of order.
Alberto Manguel
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I wanted to live among books.
Alberto Manguel
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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
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A book brings its own history to the reader.
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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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
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The world that is a book is devoured bya reader who is a letter in the world's text thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading We are what we read.
Alberto Manguel
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It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.
Alberto Manguel
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Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.
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