Quotes from Alberto Manguel

Libraries are not, never will be, used by everyone.

Ancient Egypt 1300BC Be a scribe! Engrave this in your heart So that your name might live on like theirs! The scroll is better than the carved stone. A man has died: his corpse is dust, And his people have passed from the land. It is a book that makes him be remembered In the mouth of the speaker who reads him.

Every book can be, for the right reader, an oracle, responding on occasion even to questions unasked..

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.

Books are our best possessions in life, they are our immortality.

Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary...

to lend a book is an incitement to theft. A Reader on Reading p. 281

We read to understand, or to begin to understand

Já eu, raramente empresto um livro. Se quero que alguém leia um certo livro, compro um exemplar e ofereço-lho. Acredito que emprestar um livro é incitar ao furto.

I've often felt that my library explained who I was, gave me a shifting self that transformed itself constantly throughout the years.

You don't immediately understand something like that, even when it's explained to you clearly. You don't understand it, because you don't know how to understand it. You lack that space in your mind that would let you take it in. You are incapable of believing in the possibility of what they are telling you, because nothing of the sort has ever happened to you before.

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.

Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be

And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men.

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.

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.

The discovery of the art of reading is intimate, obscure, secret, almost impossible to explain, akin to falling in love.

The books on my shelves do not know me until I open them, yet I am certain that they address me — me and every other reader — by name; they await our comments and opinions. I am presumed in Plato as I am presumed in every book, even in those I'll never read.

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.

A library is not only a place of both order and chaos; it is also the realm of chance. Books, even after they have been given a shelf and a number, retain a mobility of their own.

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.

Each reader is but one chapter in the life of a book, and unless he passes his knowledge on to others, it is as if he condemned the book to be buried alive.

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.

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.