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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.

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
Sorrow
Pleasures
Voluntary
Short
Insanity
Celestial
Hell
Soft
Pains
Pleasure
Paradise
Torment
Pain
Opposite
Yearning
Infernal
Become
Opposites
Sweetness
Yearnings
Love
Harmony
Desirable
Sorrowful
Laughter
Diamond
Blend

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I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.
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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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The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.
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Naturally, everything depends on one's background books and on what one is looking for.
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The wise man does not discriminate he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.
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I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
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The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.
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Then why do you want to know? Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
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Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.
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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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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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Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
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We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
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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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Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.
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A secret is powerful when it is empty.
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You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.
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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.
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By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.
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