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 More Quotes by Alberto Manguel More Quotes From 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 rebirth reading book 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 fate beautiful book The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. Alberto Manguel thought-provoking reading book 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 return darkness book 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 I came back every evening. Alberto Manguel home book children 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 voice space book Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion. Alberto Manguel preference library exclusion 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. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A. Alberto Manguel space darkness book 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 childhood confused book The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more. Alberto Manguel wall reflection book To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft. Alberto Manguel crafts book world Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge. Alberto Manguel reading book world Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence. Alberto Manguel library shade absence 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 space dark book As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope. Alberto Manguel crowds crafts reading The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users. Alberto Manguel reader association book Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden. Alberto Manguel reading lust self One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. Alberto Manguel creating different book 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 leaving stars memories If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence; the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything. Alberto Manguel alexandria library ambition
