Writer Quotes by Alberto Manguel

In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.

— Alberto Manguel

I wanted to live among books.

— Alberto Manguel

During the day, the library is a realm of order.

— Alberto Manguel

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.

— Alberto Manguel

Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.

— Alberto Manguel

One can transform a place by reading in it.

— Alberto Manguel

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.

— Alberto Manguel

“Libraries are not, never will be, used by everyone.”

— Alberto Manguel

“Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts. ”

— Alberto Manguel

“Books are our best possessions in life, they are our immortality.”

— Alberto Manguel

The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.

— Alberto Manguel

Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.

— Alberto Manguel

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

— Alberto Manguel

When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.

— Alberto Manguel

The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.

— Alberto Manguel

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.

— Alberto Manguel

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are…

— Alberto Manguel

In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show -…

— Alberto Manguel

In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and…

— Alberto Manguel

I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the…

— Alberto Manguel

“We can live in a society founded on the book and yet not read, or we can live in a society where…

— Alberto Manguel

We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is…

— Alberto Manguel

“The power of readers lies not in their ability to gather information, in their ordering and cataloguing capability, but in their gift…

— Alberto Manguel

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in…

— Alberto Manguel

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or…

— Alberto Manguel

“There is an unbridgeable chasm between the book that traditions had declared a classic and the book (the same book) that we…

— Alberto Manguel

I remember, as a child, the confusion of not knowing what this place was where I was supposed to spend the night:…

— Alberto Manguel

Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone…

— Alberto Manguel

“Alexandria and its scholars […] never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an…

— Alberto Manguel

At different times and in different places I have come to expect certain books to look a certain way, and, as in…

— Alberto Manguel

“I have no feeling of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my…

— Alberto Manguel

Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as…

— Alberto Manguel

“The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles…

— Alberto Manguel

We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in…

— Alberto Manguel

“There is nothing,” Naudé wrote, “that renders a Library more recommendable, than when every man finds in it that which he is…

— Alberto Manguel

“I think I read in at least two ways. First, by following, breathlessly, the events and the characters without stopping to notice…

— Alberto Manguel

“Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us…

— Alberto Manguel

“Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as…

— Alberto Manguel

One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.

— Alberto Manguel

Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

— Alberto Manguel