Alberto Manguel

"The shelves of books we havent written, like those of books we havent read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal librarys farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A."

"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."

"It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed. Those books may no longer be available for consultation, they may exist only in the vague memory of a reader or in the vaguer-still memory of tradition and legend, but they have acquired a kind of immortality."

"A book brings its own history to the reader."

"I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords."

"I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing themselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could bare lines into living reality, I was all powerful. I could read."

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

"I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometric progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before."

"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?"

"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."

"reading is at the beginning of the social contract"

"Possessing these books has become all important to me, because I have become jealous of the past."