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Deadlines comes as a surprise....superb: a new genre, in fact, combining the pleasures of list-making with that of last-minute eaves-dropping.

Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Lasts
Pleasures
Last
List
Fact
Lists
Eaves
Making
Genre
Deadlines
Comes
Minute
Superb
Facts
Surprise
Combining
Minutes
Deadline
Pleasure
Dropping

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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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.
Alberto Manguel
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A book brings its own history to the reader.
Alberto Manguel
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Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary.
Alberto Manguel
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Reading is at the beginning of the social contract.
Alberto Manguel
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I know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of our walk. It is there, it will always be there, and I don't intend to spend my glorious hours looking over my shoulder to see death's icy face.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
Alberto Manguel
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The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing.
Alberto Manguel
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As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.
Alberto Manguel
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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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Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
Alberto Manguel
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A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
Alberto Manguel
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Darkness promotes speech.
Alberto Manguel
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Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
Alberto Manguel
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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
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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.
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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The telling of stories creates the real world.
Alberto Manguel
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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.
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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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