Alberto Manguel: Reader

“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

Source: A History of Reading

Secret , Books , Universe , Childhood

“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

Books , Sense , Reading

“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

Source: The Library at Night

Sense

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

Alberto Manguel

Source: The Library at Night

Books , Reading

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

Alberto Manguel

Source: A History of Reading

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

Alberto Manguel

Source: The Library at Night

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

Alberto Manguel

The Book Fool, p. 296.
A History of Reading (1996)

Time

“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)

Learning , Reading

“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.”

Alberto Manguel

Reading The Future, p. 211.
A History of Reading (1996)

Faith , Intelligence

“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)

Knowledge , Reading , Dead

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

Alberto Manguel

The Symbolic Reader, p. 214.
A History of Reading (1996)

Books

“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 book worm, the nerd.”

Alberto Manguel

The Book Fool, p. 296.
A History of Reading (1996)

Books

“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

Metaphors of Reading, p. 168.
A History of Reading (1996)

Books , World , Way

“It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.”

Alberto Manguel

The Translator As Reader, p. 273-274.
A History of Reading (1996)

Reading , Wealth

“Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation.”

Alberto Manguel

Being Read To, p. 120.
A History of Reading (1996)

Wisdom , Books , Sense , Time

“Every text assumes a reader.”

Alberto Manguel

Endpaper Pages, p. 314.
A History of Reading (1996)

“A book brings its own history to the reader.”

Alberto Manguel

The Last Page, p. 16.
A History of Reading (1996)

Books , History

“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. Those books may no longer be available for consultation, they may exist only in the vague memory of a reader or in the vaguer-still memory of tradition and legend, but they have acquired a kind of immortality.”

Alberto Manguel

A History of Reading (1996)
Source: The Library at Night, p. 123

Books , Memory