Alberto Manguel on Books

"Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion."

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

"As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier."

"Every text assumes a reader."

"From its very start, reading is writings apotheosis."

"reading is at the beginning of the social contract"

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

"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."

"One can transform a place by reading in it."

"As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing."

"It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise 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."