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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
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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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Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
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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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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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Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.
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For Borges, the core of reality lay in books reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.
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In the light, we read the inventions of others in the darkness we invent our own stories.
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Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
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I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. ‘They'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said.
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I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.
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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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The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
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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.
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To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.
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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.
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A book brings its own history to the reader.
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When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.
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I remember, as a child, the confusion of not knowing what this place was where I was supposed to spend the night: it's a disquieting experience for a child. And what I would do was quickly unpack my books and go back to a book I knew well and make sure the same text and the same illustrations were there.
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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.
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The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.
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I never talked to anyone about my reading the need to share came afterwords.
Alberto Manguel