Alberto Manguel: Trending quotes (page 2)

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

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

“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.”

“Darkness promotes speech.”

“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.”

“As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is 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.”

“But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.”

“I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometric progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.”

“Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.”

“Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters.”

“We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.”

“I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing themselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could bare lines into living reality, I was all powerful. I could read.”

“The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.”

“Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.”