One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
Interpretation
Books connect people and ideas across time and culture.
This quote by Alberto Manguel emphasizes the powerful and unexpected connections that can be formed through literature. It suggests that books have a unique ability to transcend cultural boundaries and historical periods, fostering a sense of alliance and understanding among diverse readers and writers, ultimately enriching human experience and knowledge.
In practice
During a book club meeting, you could say this quote to express the bond formed through shared reading experiences.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
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.
He who refuses to learn deserves extinction.
You go to school, you study about the Germans and the French, but not about your own race. I hope the time will come when you study black history too.
I loved teaching, but every day that I went to work, I carried the worry that I was hurting my kids because I wasn't at home with them.
Now...in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, ipods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
It was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic primarily by being taught these things. These things are learned, but not really taught at all. Over-teaching interferes with learning, although the few who survive it may well come to imagine it was by an act of teaching.
The old system where every child was locked away and set into nonstop, daily cut throat competition with every other child for silly prizes called grades is broken beyond repair. If it could be fixed it could have been fixed by now. Good riddance.
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