Alberto Manguel

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.

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

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.

One can transform a place by reading in it.

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

Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation.

I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing themselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could bare lines into living reality, I was all powerful. I could read.

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.

From its very start, reading is writings apotheosis.

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

In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.

A book brings its own history to the reader.