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Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary.

Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Reality
Doe
Specifics
Generalities
Guise
Contrary
Deals
Literature

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.
Alberto Manguel
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The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.
Alberto Manguel
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The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
Alberto Manguel
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The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.
Alberto Manguel
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Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.
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.
Alberto Manguel
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I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.
Alberto Manguel
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In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.
Alberto Manguel
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My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
Alberto Manguel
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It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now there's still this idea that the reader doesn't take part in the social game and in politics, the res publica, but for other reasons: he doesn't do it because he's not making any money.
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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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.
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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The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
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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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