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A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Reading
Society
Without
Many
Writing
Exist

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
Alberto Manguel
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Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.
Alberto Manguel
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Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
Alberto Manguel
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Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
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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I don't remember ever feeling lonely in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.
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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Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
Alberto Manguel
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I never talked to anyone about my reading the need to share came afterwords.
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 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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Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary.
Alberto Manguel
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Deadlines comes as a surprise....superb: a new genre, in fact, combining the pleasures of list-making with that of last-minute eaves-dropping.
Alberto Manguel
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I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.
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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When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.
Alberto Manguel
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The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
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 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