Alberto Manguel

Darkness promotes speech.

— Alberto Manguel

The starting point is a question.

— Alberto Manguel

I wanted to live among books.

— Alberto Manguel

But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.

— Alberto Manguel

The telling of stories creates the real world.

— Alberto Manguel

Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.

— Alberto Manguel

Life happened because I turned the pages.

— Alberto Manguel

One can transform a place by reading in it.

— 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

Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.

— Alberto Manguel

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

— Alberto Manguel

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

— Alberto Manguel

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

— Alberto Manguel

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

— Alberto Manguel

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

— Alberto Manguel

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to…

— 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

I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful…

— Alberto Manguel

“Only when, years later, I touched for the first time my lover's body did I realize that literature could sometimes fall short…

— 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 quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read…

— 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

I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and…

— Alberto Manguel

As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted…

— Alberto Manguel

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught…

— 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

In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything…

— Alberto Manguel

If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage…

— 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

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

— Alberto Manguel

“However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is…

— Alberto Manguel

And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something…

— 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 don’t think that the definition of library has changed. Libraries have never been repositories solely of books. In Alexandria for instance,…

— 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