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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.

Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
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Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Turns
Looked
Thought
Reader
Book
Turn
Come
Open
Life
Existence
Books
Morning
Shelves
Knowledge
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More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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One can transform a place by reading in it.
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Every text assumes a reader.
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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.
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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.
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But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
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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.
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From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
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When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.
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I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.
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If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything.
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Life happened because I turned the pages.
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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.
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A book brings its own history to the reader.
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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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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I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.
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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In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.
Alberto Manguel
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If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
Alberto Manguel
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In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.
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