Alberto Manguel
Alberto Manguel
Alberto Manguelis an Argentine Canadian anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, A History of Reading, The Library at Nightand Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography; and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came. Though almost all of Manguel's books were written in English, two of his novelswere written in Spanish, and El regreso has not yet been published in English. Manguel has also...
NationalityArgentinian
ProfessionWriter
book night space
But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.
writing night light
In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.
inspirational motivational pages
Life happened because I turned the pages.
reading self lust
Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.
book numbers discovery
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.
book reader defined
Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
book reading world
Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
book perfect secret
In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.
moving eye hands
Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something not exactly defined by the word "text" unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root as I read. But how does this process take place?
ambition library alexandria
If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence; the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything.
wall book reading
The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.
morning night echoes
If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.
ambition men imagination
We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again; 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.
book kitchen library
Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.