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Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something not exactly defined by the word text unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root as I read. But how does this process take place?

Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Take
Eye
Exactly
Text
Something
Read
Except
Root
Moving
Progress
Moves
Process
Takes
Turning
Place
Hand
Page
Hands
Grows
Defined
Doe
Eyes
Roots
Progresses
Nothing
Word
Pages
Occasionally

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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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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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Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary.
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I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.
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Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.
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Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
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As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic tracts. Revenge - bloodthirsty, justice-hungry revenge - is the very essence of romance, lying at the heart of much of the best fiction.
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I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.
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Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
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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.
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Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
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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.
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One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The starting point is a question.
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Every text assumes a reader.
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