Alberto Manguel citations

“Noter nos impressions sur Hamlet après une relecture annuelle, écrivait Virginia Woolf, reviendrait à rédiger notre autobiographie puisque dès que nous en savons plus de la vie, Shakespeare commente ce que nous savons.”

“We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“I wanted to live among books.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.”

“Life happened because I turned the pages.”

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

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

“Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.”

“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.”