Top 100 Alberto Manguel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.”

— Alberto Manguel

Featured in: Reading Quotes

2. “As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.”

— Alberto Manguel

3. “The telling of stories creates the real world.”

— Alberto Manguel

4. “Life happened because I turned the pages.”

— Alberto Manguel

5. “In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.”

— Alberto Manguel

6. “The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.”

— Alberto Manguel

7. “The starting point is a question.”

— Alberto Manguel

8. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

Featured in: Reading Quotes

9. “Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.”

— Alberto Manguel

10. “During the day, the library is a realm of order.”

— Alberto Manguel

11. “Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word.”

— Alberto Manguel

12. “In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.”

— Alberto Manguel

13. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

14. “At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.”

— Alberto Manguel

15. “Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.”

— Alberto Manguel

Featured in: Reading Quotes

16. “We read to understand, or to begin to understand.”

— Alberto Manguel

17. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

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

— Alberto Manguel

19. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

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

— Alberto Manguel

21. “But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.”

— Alberto Manguel

22. “One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.”

— Alberto Manguel

23. “Every text assumes a reader.”

— Alberto Manguel

24. “If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence; the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything.”

— Alberto Manguel

25. “I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.”

— Alberto Manguel

26. “There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.”

— Alberto Manguel

27. “I don’t remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.”

— Alberto Manguel

28. “I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.”

— Alberto Manguel

29. “But who shall be the master? The writer or the reader?”

— Alberto Manguel

30. “Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.”

— Alberto Manguel

31. “Our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged.”

— Alberto Manguel

32. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

33. “In the books by Ruy-Sanchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay of what they are made. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breaths through the erotic.”

— Alberto Manguel

34. “Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.”

— Alberto Manguel

35. “As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.”

— Alberto Manguel

36. “I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.”

— Alberto Manguel

37. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

38. “Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.”

— Alberto Manguel

39. “In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian.”

— Alberto Manguel

40. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

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

— Alberto Manguel

42. “I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.”

— Alberto Manguel

43. “The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.”

— Alberto Manguel

44. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

45. “Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.”

— Alberto Manguel

46. “The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.”

— Alberto Manguel

47. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

48. “Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.”

— Alberto Manguel

49. “Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.”

— Alberto Manguel

50. “One can transform a place by reading in it.”

— Alberto Manguel