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The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

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
Sense
Later
Lunacy
Facts
Inspiration
Flashes
Tell
Liberty
Lunatic
Takes
Liberties
Whatever
Flash
Common
Sooner
Fact
Brings
Templars
Comes
Across
Confirms

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He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
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I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.
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Not bad, not bad at all, Diotallevi said. To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.
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A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.
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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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I am an old consumer of papers. I cannot avoid reading my newspapers every morning.
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Dan Brown, is a character from Foucault's Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations - the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
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Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.
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All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.
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It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
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A human best, which is very little. Its hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.
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I'm always fascinated by losers. Also, in my Foucault's Pendulum, the main characters, who are in a way losers, they are more interesting than the winners.
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I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.
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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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A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.
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Today I realize that many recent exercises in deconstructive reading read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody's mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity.
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We like lists because we don't want to die.
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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.
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Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
Umberto Eco