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The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

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
Everything
Throw
Would
Memory
Life
Entire
Function
Sick
Memories
Preserve
Away
Preserves
Also
Remembered

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libraries are fascinating places: sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of travelling to distant lands
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Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.
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Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
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What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.
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As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
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It takes a little time, but the pleasures of cooking begin before the pleasures of the palate, and preparing means anticipating.
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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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One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
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It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.
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Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.
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For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - le suggérer, voilà le rêve!).
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All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.
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I seal that which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.
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The poets did not win the philosophers surrendered.
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The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us.
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We like lists because we don't want to die.
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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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