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We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.

Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Culture
Notion
Doesn
Models
Order
Seem
Beautiful
Vision
Seems
Seen
Live
Written
Airbrushed
Literature
Blemishes
Perfect
Infects

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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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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If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
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During the day, the library is a realm of order.
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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
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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
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Darkness promotes speech.
Alberto Manguel
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The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
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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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Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.
Alberto Manguel
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Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.
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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The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
Alberto Manguel
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When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.
Alberto Manguel
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Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation.
Alberto Manguel
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A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
Alberto Manguel
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Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.
Alberto Manguel