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I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

Umberto Eco

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Umberto Eco
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: January 5
Died: 2016
Died: February 19
Essayist
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Medievalist
Novelist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Semiotician
Translator
Lissändria
Umberto Ecco
Umberto Eccounstino
Humberto Eco
Dedalus
Umberto Eko
Oumperto Eko
Eco Umberto
U. Eco
Knew
Read
Peace
War
Basics
Admit

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We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don't know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us - but is living close to us.
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History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.
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Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.
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When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
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The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.
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There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.
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Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.
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All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.
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My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
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Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.
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The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
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Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.
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Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.
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I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
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The art of splitting hairs four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We're not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it's the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn't seem completely useless.
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It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.
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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
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What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?
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I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.
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