Alberto Manguel
Canadian Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor.
Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation.
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.
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.
Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.
Possessing these books has become all important to me, because I have become jealous of the past.
The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.
Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters.
Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.
I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords.
I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.
A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
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.
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.
Every text assumes a reader.
In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.
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.
One can transform a place by reading in it.
Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature.
We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.
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.