# Quote — Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

> Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature.

- Author: [Alberto Manguel](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alberto-manguel.md)
- Book: [A History of Reading](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alberto-manguel/a-history-of-reading.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alberto_Manguel#A_History_of_Reading_(1996)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/alberto-manguel/a-history-of-reading/augustines-description-of-ambroses

## More from this book

> Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alberto-manguel/a-history-of-reading/most-readers-then.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alberto-manguel/a-history-of-reading/through-ignorance-through.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alberto-manguel/a-history-of-reading/it-hardly-matters.md)