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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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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Told
Time
Reprehensible
Humiliation
Occupation
Readers
Experienced
Reader

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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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Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
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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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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.
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As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.
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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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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.
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Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.
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The starting point is a question.
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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The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.
Alberto Manguel
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If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
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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All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.
Alberto Manguel
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The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
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I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.
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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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The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
Alberto Manguel