Book Quotes by Alberto Manguel

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

— Alberto Manguel

Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.

— Alberto Manguel

I wanted to live among books.

— Alberto Manguel

A book brings its own history to the reader.

— 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

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

— Alberto Manguel

“... to lend a book is an incitement to theft." A Reader on Reading p. 281”

— Alberto Manguel

In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.

— Alberto Manguel

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

— Alberto Manguel

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.

— Alberto Manguel

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

— Alberto Manguel

“Each reader is but one chapter in the life of a book, and unless he passes his knowledge on to others, it…

— Alberto Manguel

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

— 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

Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the…

— 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

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

To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or…

— Alberto Manguel

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke…

— 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

I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there…

— Alberto Manguel

Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God's creatures, ordered…

— 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

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

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

— Alberto Manguel

Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we…

— Alberto Manguel

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

— Alberto Manguel

I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. ‘They'll keep you company on the…

— Alberto Manguel

The world that is a book is devoured bya reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor…

— Alberto Manguel

This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come…

— Alberto Manguel

For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was…

— Alberto Manguel

My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day…

— Alberto Manguel