Alberto Manguel Quotes

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

A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.

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.

I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.

Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature.

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

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

One can transform a place by reading in it.

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

From its very start, reading is writings apotheosis.

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.

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.

Possessing these books has become all important to me, because I have become jealous of the past.

As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.