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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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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
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Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Become
Alexandria
Anything
Emblem
Everything
Omniscience
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Contained
Contains
Library
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Omnipresence

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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Our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged
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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.
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Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.
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Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.
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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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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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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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Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
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A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
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Digestion of words as well I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.
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Evil requires no reason.
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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.
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Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary.
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One can transform a place by reading in it.
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In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
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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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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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During the day, the library is a realm of order.
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Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.
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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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