“The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.” — 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
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users. — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power. — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence. — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted. — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Without Leskov there would be no Bulgakov, no Chekhov, but also no Garca Mrquez and Julio Cortzar. . . . Leskov is… — 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
“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
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
“Libraries, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their… — 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
“It is likely that libraries will carry on and survive, as long as we persist in lending words to the world that… — 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
Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. A half-remembered line is echoed by another for reasons… — 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
We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries… — 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
“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
“Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us… — 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
“There is nothing,” Naudé wrote, “that renders a Library more recommendable, than when every man finds in it that which he is… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
“The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles… — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen. — Alberto Manguel Copy Share Image
When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen. — 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
