Argentina acum nu mai există şi nenorociţii care au distrus-o trăiesc.

Alberto Manguel în Jurnal de lectură

O societate poate exista - iar unele chiar există - fără arta de a scrie, dar nicio societate nu poate exista fără arta de a citi.

Alberto Manguel în A history of reading (1996)

“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, A History of Reading

“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 Mangueltags: books, literature, reading168 people liked itLike“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, A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Bookstags: inspirational, readers, readers-and-writers, reading, reading-books, reasons-for-reading124 people liked itLike“I wanted to live among books.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Readingtags: book, books105 people liked itLike“Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Readingtags: books, escapism, reading78 people liked itLike“We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reacher, because we enjoy dreaming up a

library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: books, dream, dreaming, library, reader, reading69 people liked itLike“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. ” ― Alberto Manguel, 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, A History of Readingtags: books, child, chilldhood, read, reading57 people liked itLike“In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories. ” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: dark, light, read, stories, write51 people liked itLike“Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted. ” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: books46 people liked itLike“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.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: books, death, library45 people liked itLike“The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. ” ― Alberto Manguel, 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, The Library at Nighttags: book, books, read, reading36 people liked itLike

“Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: book, books, immortality, reader, reading, rebirth34 people liked itLike“Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: book, books, reader, reading, society31 people liked itLike“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, The Library at Nighttags: books, reading30 people liked itLike“Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Readingtags: book, books, readers, reading28 people liked itLike“Unpacking books is a revelatory activity. ” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: books27 people liked itLike“But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence. ” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at NightLike“Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at NightLike“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. ” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: book, books, reading, titles23 people liked itLike

“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, The Library at Nighttags: books, library, readers, reflection22 people liked itLike“In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.” ― Alberto Manguel, 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, The Library at Nighttags: books, library, read, reading, text, words20 people liked itLike“But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: reader, reading19 people liked itLike“I soon discovered that one doesn't simply read Crime and Punishment or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. One reads a certain edition, a specific copy, recognizable by the roughness or the smoothness of its paper, by its scent, by a slight tear on page 72 and a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of the back cover. ” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading“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.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“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, A History of Reading16 people liked itLike“The starting point is a question.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: question15 people liked it

Like“Darkness promotes speech.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: dark, darkness, speech15 people liked itLike“Life happened because I turned the pages.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

“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, The Library at Nighttags: books, library14 people liked itLike“One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. ” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: book, books, culture14 people liked itLike“At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: ghosts, library14 people liked itLike“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. ” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: technology, vocabulary, words14 people liked itLike“Evil requires no reason.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: books, libraries, reading, stories12 people liked itLike“All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with

mine. I am not alone.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Readingtags: readers, reading12 people liked itLike“Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: libraries, library11 people liked itLike“A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.” ― Alberto Manguel, Dark Arrows: Great Stories of Revengetags: fantasy, genre, writing10 people liked itLike“If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle. ” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: libraries, library, order, world9 people liked itLike“Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: libraries, library9 people liked itLike“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, The Library at Nighttags: author, desk, shelves, study, writer

9 people liked itLike“Our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night“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.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night9 people liked itLike“As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: books, government, reader, reading8 people liked itLike“In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world. ” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night“During the day, the library is a realm of order.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence. ” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity. ” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: divinity, hope, justice6 people liked itLike“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, A History of Readingtags: censorship, dictators, illiteracy, reading6 people liked itLike“I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy

we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe. ~quoting Franz Kafka” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading“No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: book, books, libraries, library5 people liked itLike“We read to lend words to our experience. As we read, we translate, as it were, the author’s words into our own experience, enlarging the meaning of those words, generation after generation. Not finding just any meaning, of course, if we read honestly, but meanings that many times escaped even the author, who is often the least shrewd of the readers of that text. We read to understand our intuition of the world, to discover that someone a thousand miles and years away has put into words our most intimate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a collaborative act.” ― Alberto Mangueltags: geist-opinion5 people liked itLike“Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: books, page, reader, reading5 people liked itLike“To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.” ― Alberto Manguel“As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt; we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation; forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic tracts. Revenge - bloodthirsty, justice-hungry revenge - is the very essence of romance, lying at the heart of much of the best fiction.” ― Alberto Manguel, Dark Arrows: Great Stories of Revenge

tags: fiction, forgiveness, morals, readers, repentance, revenge, romance5 people liked itLike“It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night5 people liked itLike“I know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of our walk. It is there, it will always be there, and I don't intend to spend my glorious hours looking over my shoulder to see death's icy face.” ― Alberto Manguel, Stevenson Under the Palm Treestags: acceptance, death, fear-of-death, living, living-well4 people liked itLike“Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts. ” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: books4 people liked itLike“I don’t think that the definition of library has changed. Libraries have never been repositories solely of books. In Alexandria for instance, the model of the ideal library perhaps, there was a will to collect every book in the world, but at the same time they had maps and objects and there was a sense that this was a world of study and communication. The technology changes, and so electronic media should enter the library as long as we don’t forget that there are also books. I don’t believe in technologies that want to exclude one another. A new technology comes into the world and believes that it can bill itself on the corpse of the previous technology, but that never happens. Photography did not eliminate painting. Film did not eliminate theater and so on. One technology feeds on the vocabulary of the other, and I believe that the electronic technology has taught us to value the reading on the page, and the reading on the page has taught us what we can do on the screen. They are alternatives, but they’re certainly not synonymous.” ― Alberto Mangueltags: library-in-the-digital-age4 people liked itLike“Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such

thing.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: almanacs, chronologies, histories, progress4 people liked itLike“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, A History of Readingtags: books, literature, reading, words4 people liked itLike“Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.” ― Alberto Manguel4 people liked itLike“Over the years, my experience, my tastes, my prejudices have changed: as the days go by, my memory keeps reshelving, cataloguing, discarding the volumes in my library, my words and my world - except for a few constant landmarks - are never one and the same. Heraclitus’s bon mot about time applies equally well to my reading: “You never dip into the same book twice.” ― Alberto Manguel, A Reader on Reading4 people liked itLike“The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present. It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here for their perusal. Above all, it tells readers that their craft consist of the power to remember, actively, through the prompt of the page, selected moments of the human experience. This was the great practice established by the Library of Alexandria.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night4 people liked itLike“This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.” ― Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books4 people liked it

Like“We can live in a society founded on the book and yet not read, or we can live in a society where the book is merely an accessory and be, in the deepest, truest sense, a reader.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night“The power of readers lies not in their ability to gather information, in their ordering and cataloguing capability, but in their gift to interpret, associate and transform their reading.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night4 people liked itLike“We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there...” ― Alberto Mangueltags: a-history-of-reading-19964 people liked itLike“Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word.” ― Alberto Manguel“Only when, years later, I touched for the first time my lover's body did I realize that literature could sometimes fall short of the actural event.” ― Alberto Manguel3 people liked itLike“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. Families beg to be united: volume XVIII of the Complete Works of Lope de Vega is announced in a catalogue, calling to the other seventeen that sit, barely leafed through, on my shelf. How fortunate for Captain Nemo to be able to say, during his twenty-thousand-league journey under the sea, that ‘the world ended for me the day when my Nautilus sank underwater for the first time. On that day I bought my last volumes, my last pamphlets, my last periodicals, and since then, it is for me as if humanity no longer thought nor wrote a single word.’ But for readers like myself, there are no ‘last’ purchases this side of the grave.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night3 people liked itLike“Paolo and Francesca were not ideal readers since they confess to Dante that after the first kiss they read no more. Ideal readers would have kissed and then read on.” ― Alberto Manguel

“The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: encyclopedia, library, world2 people liked itLike“The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: libraries, library2 people liked itLike“Libraries are not, never will be, used by everyone.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night“I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn’t understand of what use they might possibly be. ‘They’ll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,’ my teacher said.” ― Alberto Manguel2 people liked itLike“It is likely that libraries will carry on and survive, as long as we persist in lending words to the world that surrounds us, and storing them for future readers.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night2 people liked itLike“For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.” ― Alberto Manguel2 people liked itLike“Outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose. And yet, with bewildering optimism, we continue to assemble whatever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf, whether material, virtual or otherwise, pathetically intent on lending the world a semblance of sense and order, while knowing perfectly well that, however much we'd like to believe the contrary, our pursuits are sadly doomed to failure.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night2 people liked itLike“We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its

destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again; we can learn from its splendid ambition that what was one man’s experience can become, through the alchemy of words, the experience of all, and how that experience, distilled once again into words, can serve each singular reader for some secret, singular purpose.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night2 people liked itLike“Alexandria and its scholars […] never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night2 people liked itLike“Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God’s creatures, ordered alphabetically or by numbers or by the language in which the text is written, every library translates the chaos of discovery and creation into a structured system of hierarchies or a rampage of free associations.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night2 people liked itLike“Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books. I feel an adventurous pleasure in losing myself among the crowded stacks, superstitiously confident that any established hierarchy of letters or numbers will lead me one day to a promised destination. Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night“3602"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

“... to lend a book is an incitement to theft."

A Reader on Reading p. 281” ― Alberto Manguel

2 people liked itLike“As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader’s hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night2 people liked itLike“In my foolhardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamed of becoming a librarian. ” ― Alberto Manguel2 people liked itLike“There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings <...> This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading2 people liked itLike“Libraries, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic.” - The Library at Night” ― Alberto Manguel“...the point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years ago and of which we know nothing; every reading projects its shadow onto the following page, lending it content and context. In this way, the story grows, layer after layer, like the skin of the society whose history this act preserves.” ― Alberto Manguel, Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on Books, Reading, and the Worldtags: reading1 person liked itLike“Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Nighttags: computers, internet1 person liked itLike“...the Bush administration may, in future years, be remembered 'for bringing peace to the Middle East' (as Condoleezza Rice has pronounced). History may be the mother of truth, but it can also give birth to illegitimate

children.” ― Alberto Manguel, A Reader on Readingtags: history, perseverance-of-memory, politics1 person liked itLike“There is an unbridgeable chasm between the book that traditions had declared a classis and the book (the same book) that we have made ours through instinct, emotion and understanding: suffered through it, rejoiced in it, translated it into our experience and (notwithstanding the layers of readings with which a book come into our hands) essentially become its first discoverers, an experience as astonishing and unexpected.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night1 person liked itLike“Systematisches Lesen ist kaum von Nutzen. Offizielle Bücherlisten (der Klassiker, der Literaturgeschichte, der zensurierten oder empfohlenen Bücher, der Bibliothekskataloge) können per Zufall den einen oder anderen nützlichen Hinweis geben. Die beste Anleitung bieten persönliche Launen – das Vertrauen auf das Lustprinzip und der Glaube an den Zufall -, die uns manchmal in einen provisorischen Zustand der Gnade versetzen, uns ermöglichen, Gold aus Flachs zu spinnen.” ― Alberto Manguel, Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on Books, Reading, and the Worldtags: bibliophily, books, reading1 person liked itLike“The web will not be the container of our cosmopolitan past, like a book, because it is not a book and will never be a book, in spite of the endless gadgets and guises invented to force it into that role.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night1 person liked itLike“I think I read in at least two ways. First, by following, breathlessly, the events and the characters without stopping to notice the details, the quickening pace of reading sometimes hurtling the story beyond the last page <...>. Secondly, by careful exploration, scrutinizing the text to understand its ravelled meaning, finding plesasure merely in the sound of the words or in the clues which the words did not wish to reveal, or in what I suspected was hidden deep in the story itself, something too terrible or too marvellous to be looked at.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading1 person liked itLike“Cataloguing is an ancient profession; there are examples of such “ordainers of the universe” (as they were called by the Sumerians) among the oldest

vestiges of libraries.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Readingtags: cataloging, cataloguing1 person liked itLike“The categories that a reader brings to a reading, and the categories in which that reading itself is placed - the learned social and political categories, and the physical categories into which a library is divided - constantly modify one another in ways that appear, over the years, more or less arbitrary or more or less imaginative. Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading1 person liked itLike“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.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading1 person liked itLike“Sartre, in his memoirs, confessed to much the same experience. "Like Plato, I passed from knowledge to its subject. I found more reality in the idea than in the thing because it was given to me first and because it was given for a thing. It was in books that I encountered the universe: digested, classified, labelled, mediated, still formidable.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Readingtags: sartre1 person liked itLike“Je me rendis compte que personne - pas même mon père, assis à quelques pas de moi - ne pouvait pénétrer mon espace de lecture, distinguer ce que le livre m'expliquait avec impudeur, et que rien, sinon ma propre volonté, ne pouvait en donner à quiconque la possibilité.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading1 person liked itLike“There is nothing,” Naudé wrote, “that renders a Library more recommendable, than when every man finds in it that which he is looking for and cannot find anywhere else; therefore the perfect motto is, that there exists no book, however bad or badly reviewed, that may not be sought after in some future time by a certain reader.” These remarks demand from us an impossibility, since every library is, by needs, an incomplete creation, a work-in-progress, and every empty shelf announces the books to come.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night1 person liked itLike

“Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary...” ― Alberto Manguel, A Reader on Reading1 person liked itLike“3602"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 Manguel1 person liked itLike“The thing is, I don’t know if these stories he was telling were mine, or his, or someone else’s. You spend your life among words, listening, making sense out of what you say and out of what you imagine other people are saying to you, believing that something in particular happened like this or that, as a result of this or that, with these or those consequences. But it is never so simple, is it? I suppose that if we read about ourselves in a book, we wouldn't recognize ourselves, we wouldn't realize that those people doing certain things and behaving in a particular manner are us. I always believed that I knew Alejandro, that I knew him intimately, I mean, the way you might know a doll you've once taken to pieces. But it wasn't true.” ― Alberto Manguel, All Men Are Liars1 person liked itLike“This is the paradox presented by every general library: that if, to a lesser or greater extent, it intends to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive as possible a record of the world, then ultimately its task must be redundant, since it can only be satisfied when the library's borders coincide with those of the world itself.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night1 person liked itLike“...any library, by its very existence, conjures up its forbidden or forgotten double: an invisible but formidable library of the books that, for conventional reasons of quality, subject matter or even volume, have been deemed unfit for survival under this specific roof.” ― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night1 person liked itLike“The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.” ― Alberto Manguel1 person liked itLike

“I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading1 person liked itLike“Голяма книга, голяма досада."Калимах, библиотекар в Александрия, III век пр.н.е.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading1 person liked itLike“На Калимах дължим и едно каталожно улеснение, което започва да се прилага най-широко: подреждането на книгите по азбучен ред.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading1 person liked itLike“Then one day, from the window of a car (the destination of that journey is now forgotten), I saw a billboard by the side of the road. The sight could not have lasted very long; perhaps the car stopped for a moment, perhaps it slowed down long enough for me to see, large and looming shapes similar to those in my book, but shapes that I had never seen before. and yet, all of a sudden, I knew what they were; I heard them in my head, they metamorphosed from black lines and white spaces into a solid, sonourous, meangingful reality. I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing ourselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could turn bare lines into a living reality, I was all-poweful. i could read.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading