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Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.

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
Words
Opposite
Happens
Opposites
Believe
Subject
Case
Follow
Subjects
Poetry
Cases
Grasp

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It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
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Beauty is boring because it is predictable.
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We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena.
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All the blogs, Facebook, Twitter are made by people who want to show their own private affairs at the price of making fakes, to try to appear such as they are not, to construct another personality, which is a veritable loss of identity.
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Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
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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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Living the same sorrows three times was a suffering, but it was a suffering to relive even the same joys. The joy of life is born from feeling, whether it be joy or grief, always of short duration, and woe to those who know they will enjoy eternal bliss.
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To survive, you must tell stories.
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A newspaper can follow the compulsions, the desires of the readers. Take the English evening newspapers - they are following the readers' desires when they are interested only in the royal family gossip. But even the most objective, serious newspaper in the world designs the way in which the reader could or should think. That's unavoidable.
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This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.
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[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.
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A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis.
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You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.
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We like lists because we don't want to die.
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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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I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.
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Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.
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What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.
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I enjoyed your article, but I preferred my own.
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The good of a book lies in its being read.
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