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I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.

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
Later
Reading
Book
Years
Think
Thinking
Judged

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There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.
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The comic is the perception of the opposite humor is the feeling of it.
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Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.
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The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn't matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.
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When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.
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I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
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With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the USA and China.
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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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My generation knew pretty well what happened 50 years before our birth. Now I follow all the quiz programs because they are a paramount example of the span of memory of the young generation - they are able to remember everything that happened in their life but not before.
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A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.
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The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar queen, alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.
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The followers must feel besieged.
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A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.
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The Fundamental Principle that governs - or ought to govern -human affairs if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation.
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There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.
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When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us-and rightly-that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed.
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The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell - in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.
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An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.
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There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.
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But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
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