Alberto Manguel Quotes

84 quotes in 1333 categories

• Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word.
• A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
• Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.
• Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader,…
• 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 space.…
• And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had 'walked over…
• Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach…
• If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of…
• At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.... The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that when…
• 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 by…
• I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which…
• The telling of stories creates the real world.
• A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in…
• I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words…
• I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in…
• I remember, as a child, the confusion of not knowing what this place was where I was supposed to spend the night: it's a disquieting…
• I've never really understood attachment to a place for reasons of birth. That my mother happened to give birth to me in a certain place…
• In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the…
• It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now…
• We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects…

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