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The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.

Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
World
Encyclopedia
Library
Exists
Universal

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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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.
Alberto Manguel
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But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
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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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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As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.
Alberto Manguel
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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
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Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.
Alberto Manguel
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Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
Alberto Manguel
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At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
Alberto Manguel
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Reading is at the beginning of the social contract.
Alberto Manguel
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It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.
Alberto Manguel
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Without Leskov there would be no Bulgakov, no Chekhov, but also no Garca Mrquez and Julio Cortzar. . . . Leskov is the essential storyteller: he does not portray life, he creates it in all its wonder and terror and magic.
Alberto Manguel
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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
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Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
Alberto Manguel
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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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I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.
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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Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
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