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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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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
World
Metaphor
Letters
Thus
Created
Endlessness
Reader
Circular
Reading
Devoured
Read
Text
Book
Letter

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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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.
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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At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
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In the light, we read the inventions of others in the darkness we invent our own stories.
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All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.
Alberto Manguel
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I don't remember ever feeling lonely in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.
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I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. ‘They'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said.
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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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Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
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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.
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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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Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
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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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Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.
Alberto Manguel
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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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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.
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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.
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Darkness promotes speech.
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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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We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.
Alberto Manguel