199 Quotes by Alberto Manguel

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.

The web will not be the container of our cosmopolitan past, like a book, because it is not a book and will never be a book, in spite of the endless gadgets and guises invented to force it into that role.

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.

The readers who commited suicide after reading ‘Werther’ were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.

But there is something other than entertainment which one derives from reading in bed: a particular quality of privacy. Reading in bed is a self-centred act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.

A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn’t come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.

A society can exist – many do exist – without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

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.

The power of readers lies not in their ability to gather information, in their ordering and cataloguing capability, but in their gift to interpret, associate and transform their reading.