01UndatedI know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of our walk. It is there, it will always be there, and I don't intend to spend my glorious hours looking over my shoulder to see death's icy face.Alberto Manguel / quote ↗
02UndatedWe 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 / quote ↗
04UndatedIn the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.Alberto Manguel / quote ↗
06UndatedDeserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.Alberto Manguel / quote ↗
07UndatedThe 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.Alberto Manguel / quote ↗
08UndatedHistories, 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.Alberto Manguel / quote ↗
11UndatedLibraries, 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.Alberto Manguel / quote ↗
12UndatedEntering 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 / quote ↗
14UndatedThe weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.Alberto Manguel / quote ↗
15UndatedLike Petrach's, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I'm grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse the privilege.Alberto Manguel / quote ↗
16UndatedImmaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal.Alberto Manguel / quote ↗
