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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
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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
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Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Understand
Breathing
Cannot
Essential
Much
Essentials
Function
Begin
Almost
Reading
Read
More quotes by Alberto Manguel
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
Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.
Alberto Manguel
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
Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
Alberto Manguel
One can transform a place by reading in it.
Alberto Manguel
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
The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
Alberto Manguel
It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.
Alberto Manguel
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.
Alberto Manguel
Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.
Alberto Manguel
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
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
But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
Alberto Manguel
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
The starting point is a question.
Alberto Manguel
Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
Alberto Manguel
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
We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.
Alberto Manguel
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
Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation.
Alberto Manguel