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 numbers space
Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
book voice space
My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
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.
book space darkness
The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.
book space long
It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.
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.
book nerd poor
Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd.
ambition reader bounds
But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
thinking names trying
I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.
darkness speech
Darkness promotes speech.
assuming reader
Every text assumes a reader.
book pages who-we-are
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
reading social contracts
reading is at the beginning of the social contract
book hands fire
From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.