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
Alberto Manguel quotes about
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.
revenge lying heart
As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt; we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation; forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic tracts. Revenge - bloodthirsty, justice-hungry revenge - is the very essence of romance, lying at the heart of much of the best fiction.
memories giving-up book
I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.
language barriers
As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.
library authority seems
Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.
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.
teacher book might
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.
government office lockers
Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
starting starting-point
The starting point is a question.
literature joyful revelations
When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.
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.
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.
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?
ignorance creating illumination
Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.