Alberto Manguel: Read

Alberto Manguel is writer. Explore interesting quotes on read.

Alberto Manguel: 126 quotes3 likes

“In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.”

Source: The Library at Night

“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

Endpaper Pages, p. 309.
A History of Reading (1996)

“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

Source: A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books

“Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.”

Alberto Manguel

Source: The Library at Night

“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

Source: A History of Reading

“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

Source: The Library at Night

“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

Source: The Library at Night

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

Alberto Manguel

Source: The Library at Night

“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

Source: The Library at Night

“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.”

Alberto Manguel

Forbidden Reading, p. 281.
Source: A History of Reading (1996)

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

Alberto Manguel

The Last Page, p. 19
A History of Reading (1996)

“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.”

Alberto Manguel

The Missing First Page, p. 86.
A History of Reading (1996)

“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.”

Alberto Manguel

The Last Page, p. 7.
A History of Reading (1996)

“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.”

Alberto Manguel

The Last Page, p. 6.
A History of Reading (1996)

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

Alberto Manguel

Private Reading, p. 152.
A History of Reading (1996)

“Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something not exactly defined by the word "text" unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root as I read. But how does this process take place?”

Alberto Manguel

Reading Shadows, p. 28.
A History of Reading (1996)

“One can transform a place by reading in it.”

Alberto Manguel

Private Reading, p. 152.
A History of Reading (1996)

“In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.”

Alberto Manguel

Learning To Read, p. 71.
A History of Reading (1996)

“The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing.”

Alberto Manguel

The Silent Readers, p. 46.
A History of Reading (1996)

“The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.”

Alberto Manguel

The Author As Reader, p. 259.
A History of Reading (1996)