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.
At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.
There are things which seem incredible to most men who have not studied Mathematics.
I never get any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like.
Do our children now have to choose between getting an education and dying? Some of us cannot move on and accept that kind of society.
She could smell the pages. She could almost taste the words as they stacked up around her.
I feel very strongly indeed that a Cambridge education for our scientists should include some contact with the humanistic side. The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to discover what it is all about ... It is even more important when scientists are called upon to play their part in the world of affairs, as is happening to an increasing extent.
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