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The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.

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
Even
Useful
Mind
Throw
Something
Discover
Imagines
Like
Built
Afterward
Imagine
Ladder
Away
Ladders
Order
Attain
Must
Meaningless

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I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.
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Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.
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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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If western culture is shown to be rich it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to dissolve harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.
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It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
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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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When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
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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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To survive, you must tell stories.
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I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.
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I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.
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Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.
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How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.
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The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.
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A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.
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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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The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event... it was an argument.
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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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You tell me these two were my parents, so now I know but it's a memory that you've given me. I'll remember the photo from now on, but not them.
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You don't fall in love because you fall in love you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. when you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
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