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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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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
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Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Write
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May
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Multiply
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Encouraged
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More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.
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Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.
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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.
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Evil requires no reason.
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At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.
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A library is an ever-growing entity it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.
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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.
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In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian.
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Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.
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Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
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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.
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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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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 light, we read the inventions of others in the darkness we invent our own stories.
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Every text assumes a reader.
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During the day, the library is a realm of order.
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But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
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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Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.
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As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
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