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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
Giving
Understood
Mind
Happened
Thankfulness
Really
Doesn
Attachment
Never
Mother
Justify
Place
Anywhere
Certain
Reasons
Give
Towards
Reason
Birth

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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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If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.
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Darkness promotes speech.
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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.
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A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
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This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.
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As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.
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I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library.
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There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified find that line, and immortality is assured.
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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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Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.
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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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In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
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A book brings its own history to the reader.
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