11 Quotes by Alberto Manguel about libraries

  • Author Alberto Manguel
  • Quote

    No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.

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  • Author Alberto Manguel
  • Quote

    Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.

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  • Author Alberto Manguel
  • Quote

    Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.

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