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At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.... The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.

Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Every
Quality
Library
Ghosts
Reading
Carry
Movements
Turns
Finally
Closed
Voice
Various
Voices
Night
Seem
Muscles
Light
Movement
Qualities
Permeate
Seems
Turn
Ghost
Readings
Book
Sleep
Decide
Muscle

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.
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Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word.
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In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
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A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
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In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian.
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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.
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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.
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Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.
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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.
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A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn't come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.
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Every text assumes a reader.
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Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
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At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Alberto Manguel