Alberto Manguel Quotes

اعطتني القراءة عذرًا مقبولًا لعزلتي، بل ربما اعطت مغزىً لتلك العزلة المفروضة عليّ

Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

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

I wanted to live among books.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

أنا أعرف تماماً أنّ شيئاً ما يموت في داخلي عندما أستغني عن كتبي, وأن ذكرياتي تعود إليها دوماً وأبداً وتصيبني بحنين مؤلم للغاية

I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.

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.

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.

كنت أنظر دوماً إلى الروايات كمنتوج تافه , إلاّ أنني اكتشفتُ أخيراً أنها مفيدة للغاية ضد الكآبة

كان سقراط مقتنعاً بأنّ القراءة لا يمكن أن توقظ داخل القارئ إلاّ ما كان القارئ يعرفه سلفا وبأنّ الحكمة لا يمكن الحصول عليها من أحرف صمّاء ميتة .

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

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.

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.

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.

Life happened because I turned the pages.

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

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

كان تحمسي مفرطاً إلى درجة أني كنتُ أظن سأصبح إنسانة غير سعيدة إن لم أعثر دوماً على كتاب جديد أقرأه

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

أعطتني القراءة عذرا مقبولا لعزلتي، بل ربما أعطت مغزى لتلك العزلة المفروضة علي.

نحن نعرف لماذا نقرأ حتى عندما لا نعرف كيف نقرأ في الوقت نفسه نحتفظ بالعالم الظاهري للنص ونتمسك بفعل القراءة إننا نقرأ لأننا نريد العثور على النهاية فقط لأننا نريد مواصلة القراءة نحن نقرأ كالكشافة الذين يقتفون الخطى ناسين كل ما هو حولهم من أشياء نقرأ شاردي الذهن متجاوزين بعض الصفحات نقرأ باحتقار ، بإعجاب ، بملل ،بانزعاج ، بحماس وبشوق في بعض الأحيان تعترينا فرحة غامرة مفاجئة دون أن ندري ما هو السبب

غير أن القراءة بالفراش تعتبر أكثر من مجرد تمضية للوقت, إنها تمثل نوعاً من الوحدة فالمرء يتراجع مركزاً على ذاته ويترك الجسد يرتاح,ويجعل من نفسه بعيداً لا يمكن الوصول إليه مخفياً عن العالم

Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.

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

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

Darkness promotes speech.

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.

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.

في القرن الثالث عشر كتب أحدهم على حافة مجلد يضم التواريخ الكنسية : " عند قراءة الكتب عليك أن تعتاد على ملاحظة المعنى أكثر من الكلمات , والتمسك بالثمار وليس بالقشور

القارئ المثالي يخلخل النص، ولا يسلّم بكلمات الكاتب. القارئ المثالي هو قارئ تراكمي: كل قراءة لكتاب من الكتب تضفي على السرد طبقة جديدة من الذاكرة

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.

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

But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.

أثناء النهار ، أكتب ، وأنتقل بين الكتب متصفحا ، معيدا ترتيبها ، أفسح للحديث منها مكانا ، وأعيد تشكيل الاقسام لتوفير حيز جديد. الكتب الجديدة الوافدة يرحب بها بعد فترة من الفحص. إذا كان الكتاب مستعملا ، أدع كل الإشارات التي دونت عليه على حالها ، الآثار التي يتركها القارئ السابق: رفاق السفر الذين سجلوا مرورهم بالتعليقات المخربشة ، اسم ما على الصفحة البيضاء الفارغة في بداية ونهاية الكتاب ، بطاقة قطار لتأشير صفحة معينة. سواء كانت قديمة أو جديدة ، الإشارة الوحيدة التي أناضل لإزالتها من كتبي (وغالبا دون نجاح يذكر) هي لصقة السعر التي يضعها بائعو الكتب الحقودين على ظهر الكتاب. هذه الدملة الشيطانية الصغيرة التي لا تستأصل بسهولة ، فهي تخلف ندوبا مجذومة وآثارا من مادة لزجة يلتصق بها الغبار والزغب بعد فترة من الزمن ، تجعلني أتمنى لو كان لدي ممسحة جهنمية أحكم بها على هؤلاء الذين اخترعوا هذه اللصقات.

There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.

(”اذهب إلى الخارج وعش حياتك”،كانت أمي تقولها دائمًا عندما كانت تراني أقراء،كما لها أنّ أنشغالي الصامت هذا كان يتعارض مع تصوراتها عن الحياة)

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.

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.

Evil requires no reason.

The starting point is a question.

Our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged

الكتب الموجودة على رفوفي لاتعرفني إلى أن أفتحها

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.

I soon discovered that one doesn't simply read Crime and Punishment or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. One reads a certain edition, a specific copy, recognizable by the roughness or the smoothness of its paper, by its scent, by a slight tear on page 72 and a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of the back cover.

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.

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.

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

Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.

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.

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

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.

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.

الإلحاح للحصول على كتاب وتملكه هو نوع من الشهوة التي لا يمكن مقارنتها بأي شهوة أخرى.

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.

The power of readers lies not in their ability to gather information, in their ordering and cataloguing capability, but in their gift to interpret, associate and transform their reading.

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

We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act.

كنتُ أسمعها في رأسي الأسطر السوداء والفراغات البيضاءالموجودة بين الأسطر تحولت فجأة إلى معانٍ ذات إيقاع وفي حوار صامت مملوء بالإحترام تعرفنا بعضنا إلى بعض ... وما إن تمكنتُ من ربط العلامات السوداء النحيلة بعضها مع بعض وتحويلها إلى حقائق حية حتى أصبحت إنساناً جبّاراً كنتُ أستطيع أن أقرأ

الحصيلة هي أن القارئ والكتاب يصبحان وحدةواحدة العالم ككتاب يُلتهم من القارئ الذي هو بدوره حرف في نص العالم ... فإن النص والقارئ يصبحان غير مرئيين وملتحمين بعضهما ببعض بصورة لاواعية ويولدان معاني جديدة

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.

شيئا ما يموت في داخلي عندما أستغني عن كتبي.

عند القراءة نحن سذّج . نحن نقرأ بحركات بطيئة وطويلة كما لو كنّا نسبح في الفضاء . نحن ممتلئون أحكاماً مسبقة وأحقاداً . أو أننا كرماء , نغفر للنص عيوبه ونتغافل عن ضعفه و نصحح أخطاءه . في بعض الأحيان , عندما تكون السماء صحوة صافية , نقرأ بأنفاس محبوسة , بارتجاف , كما لو أنّ أحدهم قد (( سار على قبرنا )) , كما لو أنّ ذكرى قديمة منسية عُثر عليها فجأة في داخلنا - التعرف على شيء ما سبق أن عرفنا أنه كان موجوداً , أو على شيء لم نشعر به إلا كوميض أو ظل , الذي ينطلق منا ويعود إلى داخلنا قبل أن نعرف ماذا حدث - بعدئذ نكون قد تقدمنا في السن وأصبحنا أكثر حكمة

أنا أعرف تماماً أن شيئاً ما يموت في داخلي عندما أستغني عن كتبي وأن ذكرياتي تعود إليها دوماً وأبداً وتصيبني بحنين مؤلم للغاية

ليس لدي أي شعور بالذنب بشأن الكتب التي لم اقرأها وربما لن اقرأها أبداً، فأنا أعرف بأن كتبي لديها صبر لا حدود له

This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.

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

نحن ما نقرؤه.

القراءة شأنها شأن أي شيء آخر، ما لم نجد فيه بهجة، فإنه جهد لا يستحق التعب، من هنا تكمن مهمة القارئ، بأن يثق في كتابه حين يجد المتعة، وليمضي معه، حيث تكون، المتعة واللذة في القراءة أمر غامض، لربما تبدأ من نقطة ونجد أنفسنا فجأة في مسار مختلف آخر تماماً، الكثير يكتب سيراً ذاتية ومجيدة وعظيمة، لكن ليس كلها بالضرورة تخلق متعة للقارئ الجيد

أما الغريب في الأمر فهو أننا لا ننقطع أبدًا عن ممارسة فعل القراءة على الرغم من أننا لا نملك تفسيرًا مرضيًا لما نفعله

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.

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.

يظهر هذا في أن نفس الصفحة من الكتاب تدفع أحد القراء إلى التشكك في عقله والقارئ الآخر للضحك

الأماكن المربعة تشمل و تحلل، الأماكن الدائرية تقترح الاستمرارية.

Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts.

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

Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.

To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.

ثم إنني أتمتع كثيراً بمنظر الرفوف المكدسة بالكتب وبرؤية الكتب التي أعرفها جميعاً وأتلذذ بالأفكار التي توحي إلي بأنني محاط بفهرست لقسم مهم من محتويات حياتي ولما يخبئة لي مستقبلي

في إحدى المناسبات سئل الحاخام ليفي اسحاق أحد كبار معلمي الحسيديين في القرن الثامن عشر عن سبب غياب الصفحة الأولى من جميع بحوث التلمود البابلي مما يدفع القارئ الى مباشرة القراءة بالصفحة الثانية. أجاب: (على الرغم من كثرة قراءات المرء، عليه ألا ينسى أبدا أنه لم يصل بعد إلى الصفحة الأولى

I 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.

We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there...

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.

And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had 'walked over our grave,' as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us - the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.

As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader’s hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words.

As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt; we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation; forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic tracts. Revenge - bloodthirsty, justice-hungry revenge - is the very essence of romance, lying at the heart of much of the best fiction.

It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.

نحن نعرف أننا نقرأ حتى عندما نتخلى عن عدم تصديقنا , وعندما نفقد القربى من النص ; نحن نعرف لماذا نقرأ حتى عندما لا نعرف كيف نقرأ ; في الوقت نفسه نحتفظ في عقولنا بالعالم الظاهري للنص ونتمسك بفعل القراءة . إننا نقرأ لأننا نريد العثور على النهاية . فقط لأننا نريد مواصلة القراءة . نحن نقرأ كالكشافة الذين يتقفون الخطى ناسين كل ما حولهم من أشياء . نقرأ شاردي الذهن متجاوزين بعض الصفحات . نقرأ باحتقار , بإعجاب , بملل , بانزعاج , بحماسة , بحسد وشوق . في بعض الأحيان تعترينا فرحة غامرة مفاجئة دون أن نستطيع القول ما هو السبب . (( بحق السماء ما هي هذة العاطفة ؟ )) سألت ربيكا وست بعد الإنتهاء من قراءة الملك لير . (( ماذا تتميز به أعمال الفن العظيمة التي تمارس عليّ هذا التأثير الباعث على السعادة ؟ )) إننا لا نعرف ذلك ; عند القراءة نحن سُذج . نحن نقرأ بحركات بطيئة وطويلة كما لو كنّا نسبح في الفضاء . نحن ممتلئون أحكاماً مسبقة وأحقاداً . أو أننا كرماء , نغفر للنص عيوبه ونتغافل عن ضعفه و نصحح أخطاءه . في بعض الأحيان , عندما تكون السماء صحوة صافية , نقرأ بأنفاس محبوسة , بارتجاف , كما لو أنّ أحدهم قد (( سار على قبرنا )) , كما لو أنّ ذكرى قديمة منسية عُثر عليها فجأة في داخلنا - التعرف على شيء ما سبق أن عرفنا أنه كان موجوداً , أو على شيء لم نشعر به إلا كوميض أو ظل , الذي ينطلق منا ويعود إلى داخلنا قبل أن نعرف ماذا حدث - بعدئذ نكون قد تقدمنا في السن وأصبحنا أكثر حكمة .

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.

We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again; we can learn from its splendid ambition that what was one man’s experience can become, through the alchemy of words, the experience of all, and how that experience, distilled once again into words, can serve each singular reader for some secret, singular purpose.

...the point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years ago and of which we know nothing; every reading projects its shadow onto the following page, lending it content and context. In this way, the story grows, layer after layer, like the skin of the society whose history this act preserves.

The thing is, I don’t know if these stories he was telling were mine, or his, or someone else’s. You spend your life among words, listening, making sense out of what you say and out of what you imagine other people are saying to you, believing that something in particular happened like this or that, as a result of this or that, with these or those consequences. But it is never so simple, is it? I suppose that if we read about ourselves in a book, we wouldn't recognize ourselves, we wouldn't realize that those people doing certain things and behaving in a particular manner are us. I always believed that I knew Alejandro, that I knew him intimately, I mean, the way you might know a doll you've once taken to pieces. But it wasn't true.

An editor doesn't just read, he reads well, and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its scribes, only great writing. Scribes had to submit to a curious ruse: they had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer. The Attic poet Menander wrote: "those who can read see twice as well." Ancient autocrats did not want their subjects to see that well. Order relied on obedience, not knowledge and reflection. So even though he was paid to read as much as write messages, the scribe's title cautiously referred to writing alone (scribere = "to write"); and the symbol for Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was not a tablet but a stylus. In his excellent book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel writes, "It was safer for a scribe to be seen not as one who interpreted information, but who merely recorded it for the public good." In their fear of readers, ancients understood something we have forgotten about the magnitude of readership. Reading breeds the power of an independent mind. When we read well, we are thinking hard for ourselves—this is the essence of freedom. It is also the essence of editing. Editors are scribes liberated to not simply record and disseminate information, but think hard about it, interpret, and ultimately, influence it.

I don’t think that the definition of library has changed. Libraries have never been repositories solely of books. In Alexandria for instance, the model of the ideal library perhaps, there was a will to collect every book in the world, but at the same time they had maps and objects and there was a sense that this was a world of study and communication. The technology changes, and so electronic media should enter the library as long as we don’t forget that there are also books. I don’t believe in technologies that want to exclude one another. A new technology comes into the world and believes that it can bill itself on the corpse of the previous technology, but that never happens. Photography did not eliminate painting. Film did not eliminate theater and so on. One technology feeds on the vocabulary of the other, and I believe that the electronic technology has taught us to value the reading on the page, and the reading on the page has taught us what we can do on the screen. They are alternatives, but they’re certainly not synonymous.