Quotes from Alberto Manguel

as Stevenson so mournfully put it, that is the bitterness of art: you see a good effect, and some nonsense about sense continually intervenes.

Partly, what we are may be what we believe we once were and lost.

La mia biblioteca è una sorta di autobiografia. Nel proliferare degli scaffali vi è un libro per ogni istante della mia vita, per ogni amicizia, per ogni delusione, per ogni cambiamento. Segnano i miei anni come le pietre bianche che indicano la strada di un pellegrino.

A library undermines whatever order it might possess, with random pairings and casual fraternities.

Like the sea, the Web is volatile: 70 percent of its communications last less than four months. Its virtue (its virtuality) entails a constant present-which for medieval scholars was one of the definitions of hell.23

The myth that the artist needs suffering to create tells the story the wrong way round... the song comes afterwards, not in the writhing of misery but in the recollection of that misery and the respite from it provided by the writing.

My Latin teacher would say, "We must be grateful that we don't know what the great books were that perished in Alexandria, because if we knew what they were, we'd be inconsolable.

Habla el autor] A los cuatro años descubrí que sabía leer. (...) No aprendí a escribir hasta mucho después, cumplidos los siete años. Quizá pudiese vivir sin escribir. No creo que pudiera vivir sin leer. (...)

If the Epic of Gilgamesh carries a teaching, it is that the other makes our existence possible.

Literature is not dogma: it offers questions, not conclusive answers. Libraries are essentially places of intellectual freedom: any constraints imposed upon them are our own. Reading is, or can be, the open-ended means by which we come to know a little more about the world and about ourselves, not through opposition but through recognition of words addressed to us individually, far away, and long ago.

the satisfaction of one answer merely leads to asking another question, and so on into infinity.

Reading Kafka, I sense that the elicited questions are always just beyond my understanding.... They promise an answer but not now, perhaps next time, next page. Something in his writing... allows me approximations, intuitions, half-dreams, but never total comprehension.... Kafka offers me absolute uncertainties which fit so many of my own.

Desde siempre, el poder del lector ha suscitado toda clase de temores (...)temor al lector individual que puede, a partir de un texto, redefinir el universo y rebelarse contra sus injusticias.

What we put into words are the shadows of shadows, and every book confesses the impossibility of holding fully onto whatever it is that our experience seizes. All our libraries are the glorious records of that failure.

Since at the very start of the [ Epic of Gilgamesh ], the purpose of the encounter of the wild man with the civilized king was to restore justice to the city, the poem has, after all, a happy ending.

Every library both embraces and rejects. Every library is by definition the result of choice, and necessarily limited in its scope. And every choice excludes another, the choice not made. The act of reading parallels endlessly the act of censorship.

Aprendí pronto que la lectura es acumulativa y que avanza por progresión geométrica; cada lectura nueva se construye sobre lo que el lector ha leído antes.

Every story is a palimpsest, composed of layers of tellings and retellings, and every time we think we are parroting a well-known anecdote the words shed their feathers and sprout new ones for the occasion.

Pero no sólo los gobiernos totalitarios le temen a la lectura. En los patios de las escuelas y en los vestuarios de los clubes deportivos se intimida a los lectores tanto como en los despachos gubernamentales y en las prisiones.

What the poet tells us is that, after the ordeals and adventures, after the revelation and the loss, the king must do two things: preserve the splendor of his city and tell his own story. Both tasks are complementary: both speak of the intimate connection between building a city of walls and building a story of words, and both require, in order to be accomplished, the existence of the other.

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.

Los regímenes demagógicos exigen que olvidemos y, por tanto, estigmatizan los libros como un lujo superfluo; los regímenes totalitarios quieren que no pensemos y, por consiguiente, prohíben y amenazan y censuran; ambos, en general, necesitan que nos volvamos estúpidos y que aceptemos con mansedumbre nuestra degradación y por eso alientan el consumo de productos vacuos. En circunstancias como ésas, los lectores no pueden más que ser subversivos.

The identity of the city, because of the laws that define it, depends on some sort of banning or exclusion. The individual identity required the reverse: a constant effort of inclusion, a story reminding Gilgamesh that, in order to know who one is, we need two .

All reading is interpretation, every reading reveals and is dependent on the circumstances of its reader.