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 t… - Alberto Manguel

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.

Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.

At different times and in different places I have come to expect certain books to look a certain way, and, as in all fashions, these changing features fix a precise quality onto a book's definition. I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape.