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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.

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
Art
Romance
Stepped
Door
Lightly
Doors
Palaces
Behinds
Absurdity
Behind
Opens
Slams
Fiction
Warning
Fictions
Inside
Providing
Palace
Though
Shut
Slam

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I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.
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There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.
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A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
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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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Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.
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A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.
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A secret is powerful when it is empty. People often mention the Masonic secret. What on earth is the Masonic secret? No one can tell. As long as it remains empty it can be filled up with every possible notion, and it has power.
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Then we are living in a place abandoned by God, I said, disheartened. Have you found any places where God would have felt at home? William asked me, looking down from his great height.
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All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.
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When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
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The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.
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...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).
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But why doesn't the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed? I asked, for no good reason. Is Jorge right? Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn't interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave. . . .
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The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.
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The hand of God creates it does not conceal.
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If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.
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What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
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I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.
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Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.
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I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
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