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"Augustines description of Ambroses silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature."
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Alberto ManguelIt hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailme — Alberto Manguel
"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."
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Alberto Manguel
Alberto Manguel
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Alberto Manguel is an Argentine-Canadian anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, editor, and a former director of the National Library of Argentina. He is a cosmopolitan and polyglot scholar, speaking English, Spanish, German, and French fluently, and also Italian and Portuguese at a very advanced level. He left Argentina at the age of twenty, in 1968. He has lived in Israel, Argentina, Franc
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"Possessing these books has become all important to me, because I have become jealous of the past."
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Alberto ManguelQuote
"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."
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Alberto ManguelQuote
"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."
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Alberto ManguelQuote
"A book brings its own history to the reader."
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Alberto ManguelQuote
"reading is at the beginning of the social contract"
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Alberto Manguel