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
starting starting-point
The starting point is a question.
library world encyclopedia
The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
stars memories leaving
And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had 'walked over our grave,' as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us - the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.
book reading thought-provoking
The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
lines fables justified
There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.
occupation humiliation reader
Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.
reading firsts innocence
It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.
wall book reflection
The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.
book dark space
In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.
art book reading
Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.
book darkness return
Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
beautiful book fate
Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.
book crafts way
To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.
book reading rebirth
Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.