A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading. — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords. — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“... to lend a book is an incitement to theft." A Reader on Reading p. 281” — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“The power of readers lies not in their ability to gather information, in their ordering and cataloguing capability, but in their gift… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“Over the years, my experience, my tastes, my prejudices have changed: as the days go by, my memory keeps reshelving, cataloguing, discarding… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“We read to understand our intuition of the world, to discover that someone a thousand miles and years away has put into… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“There is an unbridgeable chasm between the book that traditions had declared a classic and the book (the same book) that we… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“...the point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers. — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth. — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices… The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle,… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“The categories that a reader brings to a reading, and the categories in which that reading itself is placed - the learned… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“I think I read in at least two ways. First, by following, breathlessly, the events and the characters without stopping to notice… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible. — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
At different times and in different places I have come to expect certain books to look a certain way, and, as in all fashions,… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“Then one day, from the window of a car (the destination of that journey is now forgotten), I saw a billboard by the side… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“I have no feeling of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God's creatures, ordered alphabetically or… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“Ljubav je imbecilna izvesnost pomoću koje naša fantazija stvara verodostojnu utvaru.” — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia. — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
