Top 100 Alberto Manguel Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Reading in bed is a self-centered 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.”

— Alberto Manguel

52. “But a reader’s ambition knows no bounds.”

— Alberto Manguel

53. “To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.”

— Alberto Manguel

54. “For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.”

— Alberto Manguel

55. “It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.”

— Alberto Manguel

56. “A library is not only a place of both order and chaos; it is also the realm of chance. Books, even after they have been given a shelf and a number, retain a mobility of their own.”

— Alberto Manguel

57. “As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.”

— Alberto Manguel

58. “Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.”

— Alberto Manguel

59. “Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading – once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive – is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.”

— Alberto Manguel

60. “And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had ‘walked over our grave,’ as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us – the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.”

— Alberto Manguel

61. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

62. “At different times and in different places I have come to expect certain books to look a certain way, and, as in all fashions, these changing features fix a precise quality onto a book’s definition. I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape.”

— Alberto Manguel

63. “Darkness promotes speech.”

— Alberto Manguel

64. “And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men.”

— Alberto Manguel

65. “A book brings its own history to the reader.”

— Alberto Manguel

66. “In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it’s popular. What I’m saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.”

— Alberto Manguel

67. “Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary...”

— Alberto Manguel

68. “We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology’s virtues.”

— Alberto Manguel

69. “The books on my shelves do not know me until I open them, yet I am certain that they address me – me and every other reader – by name; they await our comments and opinions. I am presumed in Plato as I am presumed in every book, even in those I’ll never read.”

— Alberto Manguel

70. “If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.”

— Alberto Manguel

71. “Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.”

— Alberto Manguel

72. “I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords.”

— Alberto Manguel

73. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

74. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

75. “Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters.”

— Alberto Manguel

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

— Alberto Manguel

77. “Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.”

— Alberto Manguel

78. “One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. A half-remembered line is echoed by another for reasons which, in the light of day, remain unclear. If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonably wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world’s essential, joyful muddle.”

— Alberto Manguel

79. “You don’t immediately understand something like that, even when it’s explained to you clearly. You don’t understand it, because you don’t know how to understand it. You lack that space in your mind that would let you take it in. You are incapable of believing in the possibility of what they are telling you, because nothing of the sort has ever happened to you before.”

— Alberto Manguel

80. “As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader’s hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words.”

— Alberto Manguel

81. “The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.”

— Alberto Manguel

82. “From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.”

— Alberto Manguel

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

— Alberto Manguel

84. “I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.”

— Alberto Manguel

85. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

86. “A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.”

— Alberto Manguel

87. “My library was to me an utterly private space that both enclosed and mirrored me.”

— Alberto Manguel

88. “Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something not exactly defined by the word “text” unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root as I read. But how does this process take place?”

— Alberto Manguel

89. “We can live in a society founded on the book and yet not read, or we can live in a society where the book is merely an accessory and be, in the deepest, truest sense, a reader.”

— Alberto Manguel

90. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

91. “Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.”

— Alberto Manguel

92. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

93. “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.”

— Alberto Manguel

94. “Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.”

— Alberto Manguel

95. “Every time we put something into words, we simultaneously pronounce a declaration fo faith in the power of language to re-create and communicate our experience of the world, and our admission of its shortcomings to name this experience fully... All our libraries are the glorious record of that failure.”

— Alberto Manguel

96. “I wanted to live among books.”

— Alberto Manguel

97. “Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.”

— Alberto Manguel

98. “If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.”

— Alberto Manguel

99. “It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.”

— Alberto Manguel

100. “Every book can be, for the right reader, an oracle, responding on occasion even to questions unasked...”

— Alberto Manguel