199 Quotes by Alberto Manguel

Sartre, in his memoirs, confessed to much the same experience. "Like Plato, I passed from knowledge to its subject. I found more reality in the idea than in the thing because it was given to me first and because it was given for a thing. It was in books that I encountered the universe: digested, classified, labelled, mediated, still formidable.

Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing.

Hinter dem westlichen Konzept einer Idealstadt verbirgt sich die Idee der Privilegierung. Moreau hätte ihm ohne Zweifel zugestimmt.

The identity of the city, because of the laws that define it, depends on some sort of banning or exclusion. The individual identity required the reverse: a constant effort of inclusion, a story reminding Gilgamesh that, in order to know who one is, we need two.

Ancient Egypt 1300BCBe a scribe! Engrave this in your heartSo that your name might live on like theirs!The scroll is better than the carved stone.A man has died: his corpse is dust,And his people have passed from the land.It is a book that makes him be rememberedIn the mouth of the speaker who reads him.

(”اذهب إلى الخارج وعش حياتك”،كانت أمي تقولها دائمًا عندما كانت تراني أقراء،كما لها أنّ أنشغالي الصامت هذا كان يتعارض مع تصوراتها عن الحياة)

[Habla el autor] (...) Al principio mantenía mis libros en rígido orden alfabético, por autores. Luego empecé a dividirlos por géneros: novelas, ensayos, obras teatrales, poemas. Más adelante traté de agruparlos por idiomas, y cuando, durante mis viajes, me veía obligado a conservar sólo unos pocos, separaba los que apenas leía de aquellos que leía todo el tiempo y, finalmente, de los que quería leer. (...)

Ésa es la riqueza y la dificultad de la literatura: que no es un dogma.

My Latin teacher would say, “We must be grateful that we don’t know what the great books were that perished in Alexandria, because if we knew what they were, we’d be inconsolable.