Alberto Manguel Quotes

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

~ Alberto Manguel

As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt; we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation; forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic tracts. Revenge - bloodthirsty, justice-hungry revenge - is the very essence of romance, lying at the heart of much of the best fiction.

~ Alberto Manguel

If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.

~ Alberto Manguel

I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.

~ Alberto Manguel

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

~ 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 to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

~ Alberto Manguel

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.

~ Alberto Manguel

I wanted to live among books.

~ Alberto Manguel

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

~ Alberto Manguel

We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.

~ 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 their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.

~ 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

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

~ Alberto Manguel

In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian.

~ 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 read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.

~ Alberto Manguel

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

~ Alberto Manguel

Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.

~ Alberto Manguel

Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.

~ Alberto Manguel

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.

~ Alberto Manguel

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.

~ Alberto Manguel

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.

~ Alberto Manguel

Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.

~ Alberto Manguel

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

~ Alberto Manguel

Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.

~ Alberto Manguel

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.

~ Alberto Manguel

I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.

~ Alberto Manguel

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

~ Alberto Manguel

In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.

~ Alberto Manguel

There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.

~ Alberto Manguel

Life happened because I turned the pages.

~ Alberto Manguel

A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.

~ Alberto Manguel

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.

~ 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

As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.

~ Alberto Manguel

We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act.

~ Alberto Manguel

Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.

~ Alberto Manguel

We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there...

~ Alberto Manguel

No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.

~ Alberto Manguel

Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts.

~ Alberto Manguel

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 our grave,' as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us - the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.

~ Alberto Manguel