Quotes from Alberto Manguel

Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.

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.

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.

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.

The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.

Uma biblioteca não é só um lugar de ordem e caos; também é o reino do acaso. mesmo depois de lhes atribuirmos uma prateleira e um número, os livros retêm uma mobilidade própria. Entregues a si mesmos, formam grupos inesperados; seguem regras secretas de semelhança, genealogias que nenhuma crónica regista, interesses e temas comuns.

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.

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

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.

Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal.

The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 actual event.

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

My library was to me an utterly private space that both enclosed and mirrored me.

Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word.

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.

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.

I have no feeling 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. They don't require that I pretend to know them all, nor do they urge me to become one of the professional book-handlers ... who greedily collect books but do not read them....

A day or so before his death, Borges called Bioy from Geneva. Bioy said that he sounded infinitely sad. "What are you doing in Geneva? Come home," Bioy said to him. "I can't," Borges answered. "And anyway, any place is good enough to die in." Bioy said that in spite of their friendship, he felt, as a writer, hesitant to touch such a good exit line.

There is an unbridgeable chasm between the book that traditions had declared a classic 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.