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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.

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
Would
Wrong
Life
Chance
Atone
Language
Remorse
Book
Repent
Right
Chose
Thing
Obsessed
Always
Chosen
Never
Prove

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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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I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
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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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Is it worth it to be born if you cannot remember it later? And, technically speaking, had I ever been born? Other people, of course, said that I was. As far as I know, I was born in late April, at sixty years of age, in a hospital room.
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Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
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Libraries can take the place of God.
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Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.
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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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but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.
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I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.
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One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
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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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My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.
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Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.
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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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When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us-and rightly-that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed.
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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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All the theories of conspiracy were always a way to escape our responsibilities. It is a very important kind of social sickness by which we avoid recognizing reality such as it is and avoid our responsibilities.
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I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22.
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The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.
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