199 Quotes by Alberto Manguel

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book – that string of confused, alien ciphers – shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

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.

The world that is a book is devoured bya reader who is a letter in the world’s text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading; We are what we read.

I’ve never really understood attachment to a place for reasons of birth. That my mother happened to give birth to me in a certain place doesn’t, to my mind, justify any thankfulness towards that place. It could have been anywhere.

Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be.

In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.

I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I’ll still be with my books.

If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world’s essential, joyful muddle.

The discovery of the art of reading is intimate, obscure, secret, almost impossible to explain, akin to falling in love.