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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.
Alberto Manguel
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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
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Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
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More quotes by Alberto Manguel
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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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.
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As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic tracts. Revenge - bloodthirsty, justice-hungry revenge - is the very essence of romance, lying at the heart of much of the best fiction.
Alberto Manguel
But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
Alberto Manguel
The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.
Alberto Manguel
Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
Alberto Manguel
In the light, we read the inventions of others in the darkness we invent our own stories.
Alberto Manguel
I know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of our walk. It is there, it will always be there, and I don't intend to spend my glorious hours looking over my shoulder to see death's icy face.
Alberto Manguel
Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
Alberto Manguel
Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
Alberto Manguel
Our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged
Alberto Manguel
The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
Alberto Manguel
But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.
Alberto Manguel
In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.
Alberto Manguel
In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.
Alberto Manguel
I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.
Alberto Manguel
Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
Alberto Manguel
We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.
Alberto Manguel
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.
Alberto Manguel
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.
Alberto Manguel