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Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.

Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Reading
Insomniac
Occupation
Excellence

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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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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But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
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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Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
Alberto Manguel
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Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
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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Reading is at the beginning of the social contract.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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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
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters.
Alberto Manguel
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Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.
Alberto Manguel
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Darkness promotes speech.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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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
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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One can transform a place by reading in it.
Alberto Manguel
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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