Alberto Manguel

“Je me rendis compte que personne - pas même mon père, assis à quelques pas de moi - ne pouvait pénétrer mon espace de lecture, distinguer ce que le livre m'expliquait avec impudeur, et que rien, sinon ma propre volonté, ne pouvait en donner à quiconque la possibilité.”

“Noter nos impressions sur Hamlet après une relecture annuelle, écrivait Virginia Woolf, reviendrait à rédiger notre autobiographie puisque dès que nous en savons plus de la vie, Shakespeare commente ce que nous savons.”

“We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.”

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

“Darkness promotes speech.”

“Evil requires no reason.”

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

“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.”

“Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing.”

“Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.”

“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. ”

“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.”

“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.”

“The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.”

“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.”

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

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

“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. ”

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

“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.”

“But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.”

“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.”

“Unpacking books is a revelatory activity. ”

“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.”

“In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world. ”

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

“Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal.”

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

“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.”

“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. ”

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

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

“In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond. ”

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

“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. ”

“No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.”

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

“Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts. ”

“Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.”

“The starting point is a question.”

“Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.”

“I wanted to live among books.”

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

“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.”

“All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.”