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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.

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
Books
Known
Story
Rediscovered
Speak
Tells
Stories
Thus
Book
Writers
Every
Already
Always
Told

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Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
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If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.
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If Bush had read all the documents about the Russians and British in Afghanistan in the 19th century, he would have not done what he did in the 21st. He would have understood how difficult it was to control this territory. He probably didn't read them.
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A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
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And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?
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Is it worth it to be born if you cannot remember it later? And, technically speaking, had I ever been born? Other people, of course, said that I was. As far as I know, I was born in late April, at sixty years of age, in a hospital room.
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There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries.
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Translation is the art of failure.
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Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.
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My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
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Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom
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It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
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And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.
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For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.
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The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief.
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.
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Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
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I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).
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When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
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The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.
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