Quotes from Alberto Manguel

Along its walls were endless bibliothekai, a term which originally designated not the room but the shelves or niches for the scrolls. Above the shelves there was an inscription: The place of the cure of the soul.

Dictionaries collect our words both to preserve them and to give them back to us, to allow us to see what names we have given to our experience throughout time, and also to discard some of those names and renew them in an ongoing ritual of baptism.... they confirm and invigorate the lifeblood of a language.

Pero leer en la cama proporciona algo más que entretenimiento; brinda también una peculiar sensación de intimidad. Leer en la cama es un acto egocéntrico, inmóvil, libre de las ordinarias convenciones sociales, invisible para el mundo y que, como tiene lugar entre las sábanas, en el reino de la lascivia y la pereza pecaminosa, comparte algo de la emoción de las cosas prohibidas.

On religious propaganda] Proclamations, gestures, articles of clothing, talismans, et cetera, become, through this propaganda, not symbolic of a belief but the demonstration of the belief itself.

Reading is reclaiming the right to... human immortality, because the memory of writing is all-encompassing and limitless.

Every day, somewhere in the world, someone attempts (sometimes successfully) to stifle a book... And again and again, empires fall and literature continues.

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

She thinks, The boy has issues. He's no longer a surly, grumpy, malicious adolescent, rude to his elders, "fat, and scant of breath." Now he's a surly, grumpy, malicious adult, rude to his elders, "fat, and scant of breath." As a mother she finds this hard to admit, but she thinks her son is not quite right in the head. As a boy he played with imaginary friends; now he sees ghosts and dreams of dark plots and weird conspiracies.

The idea persists even today: our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged.

German surgeon Johann Paul Kremer warned in his Auschwitz diary, By comparison, Dante's inferno seems almost a comedy') but as metaphor.

Die Freunde, an die ich denke, sind in der Zeit gefangen wie in einem Film. Sie (viele von ihnen sind tot, verschollen) sind in dem Alter, in dem ich sie zuletzt gesehen habe; ich bezweifle, dass sie mich jetzt wiedererkennen würden.

Hier in Buenos Aires träume ich auf Spanisch von Menschen, die nicht sprechen und mich nicht hören - und immer von der Stadt, wie ich sie früher kannte, niemals, wie sie heute ist.

Was andere als unsere Errungenschaften betrachten, ist oft nicht das, was wir selbst so sehen.

Erinnerungen und Scheinerinnerungen. Ich glaube, mich genau an etwas zu erinnern. Eine Notiz auf dem Nachsatzpapier eines Buches, das ich durch Zufall aufschlage, beweist, dass ich mich irre. Die Sache ist irgendwo anders passiert, mit jemand anderem, zu einer anderen Zeit.

Ésa es la riqueza y la dificultad de la literatura: que no es un dogma.

Kitaplarla ÅŸaÅŸk?na dönmüÅŸ Don Quijote ve hac yolcusu Dante, öÄŸrendikleriyle felce uÄŸrayan Prens Hamlet, okuduklar?yla yaÅŸamak istediÄŸi hayat? birbirine kar??t?ran Emma Bovary..

alguém versado nas palavras deveria usá-las para ensinar, para deleitar e para transformar; isto é, ensinar ao ignorante, deleitar o enfastiado e transformar o indolente"39

I remember, as a child, the confusion of not knowing what this place was where I was supposed to spend the night: it's a disquieting experience for a child. And what I would do was quickly unpack my books and go back to a book I knew well and make sure the same text and the same illustrations were there.

The telling of stories creates the real world.

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.

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.

Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.

A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn't come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.

In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.