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I Returned To The Courtyard And Saw That The Sun Had Grown Weaker. Beautiful And Clear As It Had Been, The Morning (as The Day Approached The Completion Of Its First Half) Was Becoming Damp And Misty. Heavy Clouds Moved From The North And Were Invading The Top Of The Mountain, Covering It With A Light Brume. It Seemed To Be Fog, And Perhaps Fog Was Also Rising From The Ground, But At That Altitude It Was Difficult To Distinguish The Mists That Rose From Below And Those That Come Down From Above. It Was Becoming Hard To Discern The Bulk Of The More Distant Buildings.

-Umberto Eco

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I Returned To The

Umberto Eco

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I Returned To The Courtyard And Saw That The Sun Had Grown Weaker. Beautiful And Clear As It Had Been, The Morning (as The Day Approached The Completion Of Its First Half) Was Becoming Damp And Misty. Heavy Clouds Moved From The North And Were Invading The Top Of The Mountain, Covering It With A Light Brume. It Seemed To Be Fog, And Perhaps Fog Was Also Rising From The Ground, But At That Altitude It Was Difficult To Distinguish The Mists That Rose From Below And Those That Come Down From Above. It Was Becoming Hard To Discern The Bulk Of The More Distant Buildings.

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Being A Professional Philosopher Is, I Would Say, Feeling Natural To Think About Small And Great Problems. It Is The Only Pleasure.

One Can Be A Great Poet And Be Politically Stupid.

Narrativity Presumes A Special Taste For Plot. And This Taste For Plot Was Always Very Present In The Anglo-saxon Countries And That Explains Their High Quality Of Detective Novels.

We Have A Limit, A Very Discouraging, Humiliating Limit: Death. That's Why We Like All The Things That We Assume Have No Limits And, Therefore, No End. It's A Way Of Escaping Thoughts About Death. We Like Lists Because We Don't Want To Die.

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.

For Such Is The Fate Of Parody: It Must Never Fear Exaggerating. If It Strikes Home, It Will Only Prefigure Something That Others Will Then Do Without A Smile--and Without A Blush--in Steadfast Virile Seriousness.

And So I Fell Devoutly Asleep And Slept A Long Time, Because Young People Seem To Need Sleep More Than The Old, Who Have Already Slept So Much And Are Preparing To Sleep For All Eternity.

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.

Captain Cook Discovered Australia Looking For The Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus Thought He Was Finding India But Discovered America. History Is Full Of Events That Happened Because Of An Imaginary Tale.

The Void Is Not Being, But Not Being Cannot Be, Ergo The Void Cannot Be. The Reasoning Was Sound, Because It Denied The Void While Granting That It Could Be Conceived. In Fact, We Can Quite Easily Conceive Things That Do Not Exist. Can A Chimera, Buzzing In The Void, Devour Second Intentions? No, Because Chimeras Do Not Exist, In The Void No Buzzing Can Be Heard, And Intentions Are Mental Things - An Intended Pear Does Not Nourish Us. And Yet I Can Think Of A Chimera Even If It Is Chimerical, Namely, If It Is Not. And The Same With The Void.

Sometimes You Say Things With A Smile With The Precise Intention Of Making It Clear That You Are Not Being Serious, And Are Only Kidding. If I Salute A Friend With A Smile And Say, "how Are You, You Old Scoundrel!" Clearly I Don't Really Mean He's A Scoundrel.

[i Am Fascinated By Stupidity] Because Normal Intelligence Is Boring. Two Plus Two Makes Four - Finished. You Have No Possibilities! Stupidity Is Infinite. Two Plus Two Can Make Billions Of Different Numbers.

I Should Be At Peace. I Have Understood. Don't Some Say That Peace Comes When You Understand? I Have Understood. I Should Be At Peace. Who Said That Peace Derives From The Contemplation Of Order, Order Understood, Enjoyed, Realized Without Residuum, In Joy And Truimph, The End Of Effort? All Is Clear, Limpid; The Eye Rests On The Whole And On The Parts And Sees How The Parts Have Conspired To Make The Whole; It Perceives The Center Where The Lymph Flows, The Breath, The Root Of The Whys.

The Author May Not Interpret. But He Must Tell Why And How He Wrote His Book.

The Enlightenment, The Age Of Reason, Is Seen As The Beginning Of Modern Depravity.

Listening Doesn't Mean Trying To Understand. Anything, However Trifling, May Be Of Use One Day. What Matters Is To Know Something That Others Don't Know You Know.

Not Long Ago, If You Wanted To Seize Political Power In A Country You Had Merely To Control The Army And The Police. Today It Is Only In The Most Backward Countries That Fascist Generals, In Carrying Out A Coup D'état, Still Use Tanks. If A Country Has Reached A High Degree Of Industrialization The Whole Scene Changes.... Today A Country Belongs To The Person Who Controls Communications.

Semiotics Is In Principle The Discipline Studying Everything Which Can Be Used In Order To Lie. If Something Cannot Be Used To Tell A Lie, Conversely It Cannot Be Used To Tell The Truth: It Cannot In Fact Be Used "to Tell" At All.

I Write Stories About Conspiracies And Paranoid Characters While I Am, In Fact, A Very Skeptical Person.

When Your True Enemies Are Too Strong, You Have To Choose Weaker Enemies.

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.

The Book Is Like The Spoon, Scissors, The Hammer, The Wheel. Once Invented, It Cannot Be Improved. You Cannot Make A Spoon That Is Better Than A Spoon... The Book Has Been Thoroughly Tested, And It's Very Hard To See How It Could Be Improved On For Its Current Purposes.

[in My Writing] I Know That I Have Made A Caricature Out Of [others' Academic] Theories [but] I Think That Caricatures Are Frequently Good Portraits.

... Luckily, Eden Is Soon Populated. The Ethical Dimension Begins When The Other Appears On The Scene.

We Have A Limit, A Very Discouraging, Humiliating Limit: Death.

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.

Creativity Can Only Be Anarchic, Capitalist, Darwinian.

Idiot. Above Her Head Was The Only Stable Point In The Cosmos, The Only Refuge From The Damnation Of The Panta Rei, And She Guessed It Was The Pendulum's Business. A Moment Later The Couple Went Off -- He, Trained On Some Textbook That Had Blunted His Capacity For Wonder, She, Inert And Insensitive To The Thrill Of The Infinite, Both Oblivious Of The Awesomeness Of Their Encounter -- Their First And Last Encounter -- With The One, The Ein-sof, The Ineffable. How Could You Fail To Kneel Down Before This Altar Of Certitude?

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.

Better Reality Than A Dream: If Something Is Real, Then It's Real And You're Not To Blame.

Hypotyposis Is The Rhetorical Effect By Which Words Succeed In Rendering A Visual Scene.

The Comic Is The Perception Of The Opposite; Humor Is The Feeling Of It.

A Writer Writes For Writers, A Non-writer Writes For His Next-door Neighbor Or For The Manager Of The Local Bank Branch, And He Fears (often Mistakenly) That They Would Not Understand Or, In Any Case, Would Not Forgive His Boldness.

There Is Only One Thing That Arouses Animals More Than Pleasure, And That Is Pain. Under Torture You Are As If Under The Dominion Of Those Grasses That Produce Visions. Everything You Have Heard Told, Everything You Have Read Returns To Your Mind, As If You Were Being Transported, Not Toward Heaven, But Toward Hell. Under Torture You Say Not Only What The Inquisitor Wants, But Also What You Imagine Might Please Him, Because A Bond (this, Truly, Diabolical) Is Established Between You And Him.

The Fundamental Principle That Governs - Or Ought To Govern -human Affairs If We Wish To Avoid Misunderstandings, Conflicts, Or Pointless Utopias, Is Negotiation.

The Most Interesting Letters I Received About 'the Name Of The Rose' Were From People In The Midwest That Maybe Didn't Understand Exactly, But Wanted To Understand More And Who Were Excited By This Picture Of A World Which Was Not Their Own.

Well, Diotallevi And I Are Planning A Reform In Higher Education. A School Of Comparative Irrelevance, Where Useless Or Impossibe Courses Are Given. The School's Aim Is To Turn Out Scholars Capable Of Endlessly Increasing The Number Of Unnecessary Subjects.

The More Things You Know, Or Pretend To Know, The More Powerful You Are. It Doesn't Matter If The Things Are True. What Counts, Remember, Is To Possess A Secret.

For, I Must Tell You, In This World Where Today All Lose Their Minds Over Many & Wondrous Machines - Some Of Which, Alas, You Can See Also In This Siege - I Construct Aristotelian Machines, That Allow Anyone To See With Words.

Musical Compositions Can Be Very Sad - Chopin - But You Have The Pleasure Of This Sadness. The Cheap Consolation Is: You Will Be Happy. The Higher Consolation Is The Pleasure And Recognition Of Your Unhappiness, The Pleasure Of Having Recognised That Fate, Destiny And Life Are Such As They Are And So You Reach A Higher Form Of Consciousness.

Living The Same Sorrows Three Times Was A Suffering, But It Was A Suffering To Relive Even The Same Joys. The Joy Of Life Is Born From Feeling, Whether It Be Joy Or Grief, Always Of Short Duration, And Woe To Those Who Know They Will Enjoy Eternal Bliss.

The Faith A Movement Proclaims Doesn't Count: What Counts Is The Hope It Offers. All Heresies Are The Banner Of A Reality, An Exclusion. Scratch The Heresy And You Will Find The Leper. Every Battle Against Heresy Wants Only This: To Keep The Leper As He Is.

The Function Of Memory Is Not Only To Preserve, But Also To Throw Away. If You Remembered Everything From Your Entire Life, You Would Be Sick.

Reflecting On These Complex Relationships Between Reader And Story, Fiction And Life, Can Constitute A Form Of Therapy Against The Sleep Of Reason, Which Generates Monsters.

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.

Sometimes My Characters Are Not Myself.

A Democratic Civilization Will Save Itself Only If It Makes The Language Of The Image Into A Stimulus For Critical Reflection - Not An Invitation For Hypnosis.

The Print Does Not Always Have The Same Shape As The Body That Impressed It, And It Doesn't Always Derive From The Pressure Of A Body. At Times It Reproduces The Impression A Body Has Left In Our Mind: It Is The Print Of An Idea.

This, In Fact, Is The Power Of The Imagination, Which, Combining The Memory Of Gold With That Of The Mountain, Can Compose The Idea Of A Golden Mountain.

I Don't Want To Write A Novel Per Year. I Know That I Need A Break Of One Or Two Years. So Maybe I Invent Some New, Urgent Activity So I Don't Fall Into The Trap Of Starting A New Novel.

In Short, Roberto Privately Concluded, If You Would Avoid Wars, Never Make Treaties Of Peace.

To Escape The Power Of The Unknown, To Prove To Yourself That You Don't Believe In It, You Accept Its Spells. Like An Avowed Atheist Who Sees The Devil At Night, You Reason: He Certainly Doesn't Exist; This Is Therefore An Illusion, Perhaps A Result Of Indigestion. But The Devil Is Sure That He Exists, And Believes In His Upside-down Theology. What, Then, Will Frighten Him? You Make The Sign Of The Cross, And He Vanishes In A Puff Of Brimstone.

Any Fact Becomes Important When It's Connected To Another.

In Other Words, Although I Don't Like Them, We Do Need Noble-spirited Souls.

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.

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.

Daytime Sleep Is Like The Sin Of The Flesh; The More You Have The More You Want, And Yet You Feel Unhappy, Sated And Unsated At The Same Time.

We Invented The Car, And It Made It Easier For Us To Crash And Die. If I Gave A Car To My Grandfather, He Would Die In Five Minutes, While I Have Grown Up Slowly To Accept Speed.

Semiotics Is A General Theory Of All Existing Languages... All Forms Of Communication - Visual, Tactile, And So On... There Is General Semiotics, Which Is A Philosophical Approach To This Field, And Then There Are Many Specific Semiotics.

Where Else? I Belong To A Lost Generation And Am Comfortable Only In The Company Of Others Who Are Lost And Lonely.

I Was The Type Who Looked At Discussions Of What Is Truth Only With A View Toward Correcting The Manuscript. If You Were To Quote "i Am That I Am," For Example, I Thought That The Fundamental Problem Was Where To Put The Comma, Inside The Quotation Marks Or Outside.

Quotation Marks

And What Would We Be, We Sinful Creatures, Without Fear, Perhaps The Most Foresighted, The Most Loving Of The Divine Gifts?

In The United States, Politics Is A Profession, Whereas In Europe It Is A Right And A Duty .

"you Cannot Believe What You Are Saying." "well, No. Hardly Ever. But The Philosopher Is Like The Poet. The Latter Composes Ideal Letters For An Ideal Nymph, Only To Plumb With His Words The Depths Of Passion. The Philosopher Tests The Coldness Of His Gaze, To See How Far He Can Undermine The Fortress Of Bigotry."

...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).

Followers Of The Occult Believe In Only What They Already Know, And In Those Things That Confirm What They Have Already Learned.

American Coffee Can Be A Pale Solution Served At A Temperature Of 100oc

The Truth Is A Young Maiden As Modest As She Is Beautiful, And Therefore She Is Always Seen Cloaked.

Perhaps The Mission Of Those Who Love Mankind Is To Make People Laugh At The Truth, To Make Truth Laugh, Because The Only Truth Lies In Learning To Free Ourselves From Insane Passion For The Truth.

Thus We Have On Stage Two Men, Each Of Whom Knows Nothing Of What He Believes The Other Knows, And To Deceive Each Other Reciprocally Both Speak In Allusions, Each Of The Two Hoping (in Vain) That The Other Holds The Key To His Puzzle.

Writing Doesn't Mean Necessarily Putting Words On A Sheet Of Paper. You Can Write A Chapter While Walking Or Eating.

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.

The Art Of Splitting Hairs Four Ways. This Is The Department Of Useless Techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, For Example, Is How To Build Machines For Greeting Uncles. We're Not Sure, Though, If Pylocatabasis Belongs, Since It's The Art Of Being Saved By A Hair. Somehow That Doesn't Seem Completely Useless.

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.

The Followers Must Feel Besieged.

I Would Define The Poetic Effect As The Capacity That A Text Displays For Continuing To Generate Different Readings, Without Ever Being Completely Consumed.

A Narrator Should Not Supply Interpretations Of His Work; Otherwise He Would Have Not Written A Novel, Which Is A Machine For Generating Interpretations.

When Men Stop Believing In God, It Isn't That They Then Believe In Nothing: They Believe In Everything.

A Dream Is A Scripture, And Many Scriptures Are Nothing But Dreams.

I Started To Work In Television For Three Or Four Years, In 1954. There Was One Channel Of Television, Black And White. But It Could Be Entertaining And Educational. During The Evening They Showed Important Plays, Opera Or Shakespeare's Tragedies.

Black And White

Simple Mechanisms Do Not Love.

I Enjoyed Your Article, But I Preferred My Own.

For Centuries, As Pope And Emperor Tore Each Other Apart In Their Quarrels Over Power, The Excluded Went On Living On The Fringe, Like Lepers, Of Whom True Lepers Are Only The Illustration Ordained By God To Make Us Understand This Wondrous Parable, So That In Saying 'lepers' We Would Understand 'outcast, Poor, Simple, Excluded, Uprooted From The Countryside, Humiliated In The Cities.' But We Did Not Understand; The Mystery Of Leprosy Has Continued To Haunt Us Because We Have Not Recognized The Nature Of The Sign.

Beauty Is Boring Because It Is Predictable.

The Cultivated Person's First Duty Is To Be Always Prepared To Rewrite The Encyclopedia.

When I Went From Being An Academic To Being A Member Of The Community Of Writers Some Of My Former Colleagues Did Look On Me With A Certain Resentment.

But It Has Often Happened That I Have Found The Most Seductive Depictions Of Sin In The Pages Of Those Very Men Of Incorruptible Virtue Who Condemned Their Spell And Their Effects.

I Have Always Been Fascinated By Paranoid People Imagining Conspiracies. I Am Fascinated By This In A Critical Way.

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.

To Play The Trumpet, You Must Train Your Lips For A Long Time. When I Was Twelve Or Thirteen I Was A Good Player, But I Lost The Skill And Now I Play Very Badly. I Do It Every Day Even So. The Reason Is That I Want To Return To My Childhood. For Me, The Trumpet Is Evidence Of The Sort Of Young Man I Was.

The Problem With The Internet Is That It Gives You Everything - Reliable Material And Crazy Material. So The Problem Becomes, How Do You Discriminate?

The Postmodern Reply To The Modern Consists Of Recognizing That The Past, Since It Cannot Really Be Destroyed, Because Its Destruction Leads To Silence, Must Be Revisited: But With Irony, Not Innocently. I Think Of The Postmodern Attitude As That Of A Man Who Loves A Very Cultivated Woman And Knows He Cannot Say To Her, I Love You Madly, Because He Knows That She Knows (and That She Knows That He Knows) That These Words Have Already Been Written By Barbara Cartland. Still, There Is A Solution. He Can Say, As Barbara Cartland Would Put It, I Love You Madly.

That Is A Real Attitude - To See Everything As Being Meaningful, Even The Less Important Things, To Prove Something, Even The Greater Problems Of Life.

Mystical Additions And Subtractions Always Come Out The Way You Want.

For The Enemy To Be Recognized And Feared, He Has To Be In Your Home Or On Your Doorstep.

When The Writer (or The Artist In General) Says He Has Worked Without Giving Any Thought To The Rules Of The Process, He Simply Means He Was Working Without Realizing He Knew The Rules.

If Culture Did Not Filter, It Would Be Inane - As Inane As The Formless, Boundless Internet Is On Its Own. And If We All Possessed The Boundless Knowledge Of The Web, We Would Be Idiots! Culture Is An Instrument For Making A Hierarchical System Of Intellectual Labor.

Not That The Incredulous Person Doesn't Believe In Anything. It's Just That He Doesn't Believe In Everything.

To Establish What Is True Is Very Difficult. Frequently It Is Easier To Establish What Is False. And, Passing Through The False, It's Possible To Understand Something About Truth.

I Have Come To Believe That The Whole World Is An Enigma, A Harmless Enigma That Is Made Terrible By Our Own Mad Attempt To Interpret It As Though It Had An Underlying Truth.

I Am An Old Consumer Of Papers. I Cannot Avoid Reading My Newspapers Every Morning.

Usually Naive Interviewers Hover Between Two Mutually Contradictory Convictions: One, That A Text We Call Creative Develops Almost Instantaneously In The Mystic Heat Of Inspirational Raptus; Or The Other, That The Writer Has Followed A Recipe, A Kind Of Secret Set Of Rules That They Would Like To See Revealed. There Is No Set Of Rules, Or, Rather, There Are Many, Varied And Flexible Rules.

Media Populism Means Appealing To People Directly Through Media. A Politician Who Can Master The Media Can Shape Political Affairs Outside Of Parliament And Even Eliminate The Mediation Of Parliament.

The Hand Of God Creates; It Does Not Conceal.

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.

Is It Possible To Say "it Was A Beautiful Morning At The End Of November" Without Feeling Like Snoopy?

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.

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.

It Takes A Little Time, But The Pleasures Of Cooking Begin Before The Pleasures Of The Palate, And Preparing Means Anticipating.

In The Middle Ages, Cathendrals And Convents Burned Like Tinder; Imagining A Medieval Story Without A Fire Is Like Imagining A World War Ii Movie In The Pacific Without A Fighter Plane Shot Down In Flames.

A Mystic Is A Hysteric Who Has Met Her Confessor Before Her Doctor.

I Like Nicotine Because It Excites My Brain And Helps Me Work.

Absence Is To Love As Wind Is To Fire: It Extinguishes The Little Flame, It Fans The Big.

After Years Of Practice, I Can Walk Into A Bookstore And Understand Its Layout In A Few Seconds. I Can Glance At The Spine Of A Book And Make A Good Guess At Its Content From A Number Of Signs.

I Could Work In The Shower If I Had Plastic Paper.

Every Time That I Write A Novel I Am Convinced For At Least Two Years That It Is The Last One, Because A Novel Is Like A Child. It Takes Two Years After Its Birth. You Have To Take Care Of It. It Starts Walking, And Then Speaking.

Our Most Noted Satirists Are True Columnists And Their Opinions Can Be Worth More Than Any Well-documented Exposé.

People Are Tired Of Simple Things. They Want To Be Challenged.

A Book Is A Fragile Creature, It Suffers The Wear Of Time, It Fears Rodents, The Elements And Clumsy Hands. So The Librarian Protects The Books Not Only Against Mankind But Also Against Nature And Devotes His Life To This War With The Forces Of Oblivion.

There Is Only One Thing That You Write For Yourself, And That Is A Shopping List.

I Consider Always The Adult Life To Be The Continuous Retrieval Of Childhood.

Terrorism [is] A Biological Consequence Of The Multinationals, Just As A Day Of Fever Is The Reasonable Price Of An Effective Vaccine . . . The Conflict Is Between Great Powers, Not Between Demons And Heroes. Unhappily, Therefore, Is The Nation That Finds The "heroes" Underfoot, Especially If They Still Think In Religious Terms And Involve The Population In Their Bloody Ascent To An Uninhabited Paradise.

He Who Laughs Does Not Believe In What He Laughs At, But Neither Does He Hate It. Therefore, Laughing At Evil Means Not Preparing Oneself To Combat It, And Laughing At Good Means Denying The Power Through Which Good Is Self-propagating.

By Means Of The Sign, Man Frees Himself From The Here And Now For Abstraction.

Religion Has Nothing To Do With God. It's A Fundamental Attitude Of Human Beings, Who Ask About The Origins Of Life And What Happens After Death. For Many, The Answer Is A Personal God. In My Opinion, It's Religion That Produces God, Not The Other Way Round.

There Are Magic Moments, Involving Great Physical Fatigue And Intense Motor Excitement, That Produce Visions Of People Known In The Past. As I Learned Later From The Delightful Little Book Of The Abbé De Bucquoy, There Are Also Visions Of Books As Yet Unwritten.

You Always Want Someone To Hate In Order To Feel Justified In Your Own Misery. Hatred Is The True Primordial Passion. It Is Love That's Abnormal. That Is Why Christ Was Killed: He Spoke Against Nature. You Don't Love Someone For Your Whole Life - That Impossible Hope Is The Source Of Adultery, Matricide, Betrayal Of Friends ... But You Can Hate Someone For Your Whole Life - Provided He's Always There To Keep Your Hatred Alive. Hatred Warms The Heart.

We Are Formed By Little Scraps Of Wisdom.

I Have Lost The Freedom Of Not Having An Opinion.

My Maternal Grandmother - She Was A Compulsive Reader. She Had Only Been Through Five Grades Of Elementary School, But She Was A Member Of The Municipal Library, And She Brought Home Two Or Three Books A Week For Me. They Could Be Dime Novels Or Balzac.

We Live For Books.

I Dared, For The First And Last Time In My Life, To Express A Theological Conclusion: "but How Can A Necessary Being Exist Totally Polluted With The Possible? What Difference Is There, Then, Between God And Primogenial Chaos? Isn't Affirming God's Absolute Omnipotence And His Absolute Freedom With Regard To His Own Choices Tantamount To Demonstrating That God Does Not Exist?

A Monk Should Surely Love His Books With Humility, Wishing Their Good And Not The Glory Of His Own Curiosity; But What The Temptation Of Adultery Is For Laymen And The Yearning For Riches Is For Secular Ecclesiastics, The Seduction Of Knowledge Is For Monks.

True Learning Must Not Be Content With Ideas, Which Are, In Fact, Signs, But Must Discover Things In Their Individual Truth.

I Believe All Sin, Love, Glory Are This: When You Slide Down The Knotted Sheets, Escaping From Gestapo Headquarters, And She Hugs You, There, Suspended, And She Whispers That She's Always Dreamed Of You. The Rest Is Just Sex, Copulation, The Perpetuation Of The Vile Species.

American Coffee Can Be A Pale Solution Served At A Temperature Of 100 Degrees Centigrade In Plastic Thermos Cups, Usually Obligatory In Railroad Stations For Purposes Of Genocide, Whereas Coffee Made With An American Percolator, Such As You Find In Private Houses Or In Humble Luncheonettes, Served With Eggs And Bacon, Is Delicious, Fragrant, Goes Down Like Pure Spring Water, And Afterwards Causes Severe Palpitations, Because One Cup Contains More Caffeine Than Four Espressos.

When One Starts Writing A Book, Especially A Novel, Even The Humblest Person In The World Hopes To Become Homer.

Whenever A Poet Or Preacher, Chief Or Wizard Spouts Gibberish, The Human Race Spends Centuries Deciphering The Message.

Certainly, Light Fiction Exists And Encompasses Mysteries Or Second-class Romance Novels, Books That Are Read On The Beach, Whose Only Aim Is To Entertain. These Books Are Not Concerned With Style Or Creativity - Instead They Are Successful Because They Are Repetitive And Follow A Template That Readers Enjoy.

We Were Clever Enough To Turn A Laundry List Into Poetry.

The Step Between Ecstatic Vision And Sinful Frenzy Is All Too Brief.

Nothing Gives A Fearful Man More Courage Than Another's Fear.

Entering A Novel Is Like Going On A Climb In The Mountains: You Have To Learn The Rhythms Of Respiration - Acquire The Pace. Otherwise You Stop Right Away.

To Imagine Secret Societies And Conspiracy Is A Way Not To React To The Social And Political Life. Because You Say, "we Don't Know Who They Are. We Cannot React Without Reasoning." So It Is A Way To Keep People Far From The Political Environment.

I Don't See The Point Of Having 80 Million People Online If All They Are Doing In The End Is Talking To Ghosts In The Suburbs.

It Is Necessary To Meditate Early, And Often, On The Art Of Dying To Succeed Later In Doing It Properly Just Once.

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.

Whoever Reflects On Four Things I Would Be Better If He Were Never Born: That Which Is Above, That Which Is Below, That Which Is Before, That Which Is After.

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.

To Survive, You Must Tell Stories.

Originality And Creativity Are Nothing But The Result Of The Wise Management Of Combinations. The Creative Genius Combines More Rapidly, And With A Greater Critical Sense Of What Gets Tossed Out And What Gets Saved, The Same Material That The Failed Genius Has To Work With.

Books Are Not Made To Be Believed, But To Be Subjected To Inquiry.

There Are Four Types: The Cretin, The Imbecile, The Stupid And The Mad. Normality Is A Balanced Mixture Of All Four.

As An Adolescent I Wrote Comic Books, Because I Read Lots Of Them, And Fantasy Novels Set In Malaysia And Central Africa.

My Collection Of Rare Books Concerns Only Books That Don't Tell The Truth.

Telling The Truth

But I Had Also Learned That Freedom Of Speech Means Freedom From Rhetoric.

Freedom Of Speech

And We, Inhabitants Of The Great Coral Of The Cosmos, Believe The Atom (which Still We Cannot See) To Be Full Matter, Whereas, It Too, Like Everything Else, Is But An Embroidery Of Voids In The Void, And We Give The Name Of Being, Dense And Even Eternal, To That Dance Of Inconsistencies, That Infinite Extension That Is Identified With Absolute Nothingness And That Spins From Its Own Non-being The Illusion Of Everything.

I Lacked The Courage To Investigate The Weaknesses Of The Wicked, Because I Discovered They Are The Same As The Weaknesses Of The Saintly.

To Read Fiction Means To Play A Game By Which We Give Sense To The Immensity Of Things That Happened, Are Happening, Or Will Happen In The Actual World. By Reading Narrative, We Escape The Anxiety That Attacks Us When We Try To Say Something True About The World. This Is The Consoling Function Of Narrative — The Reason People Tell Stories, And Have Told Stories From The Beginning Of Time.

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.

Deciding What Is Being Talked About Is A Kind Of Interpretive Bet.

Contemporary Societies Have Lost The Sense Of The Feast But Have Kept The Obscure Drive For It.

When The Poet Is In Love, He Is Incapable Of Writing Poetry On Love. He Has To Write When He Remembers That He Was In Love.

Once You Reach Your Fifties, You Have To Stop Being Interested In The Present And Write Only On Elizabethan Poets.

Translation Is The Art Of Failure.

From Lies To Forgeries The Step Is Not So Long, And I Have Written Technical Essays On The Logic Of Forgeries And On The Influence Of Forgeries On History.

How Clear Everything Becomes When You Look From The Darkness Of A Dungeon.

Nothing Is More Fleeting Than External Form, Which Withers And Alters Like The Flowers Of The Field At The Appearance Of Autumn.

I Am Not On Facebook And On Twitter Because The Purpose Of My Life Is To Avoid Messages. I Receive Too Many Messages From The World, And So I Try To Avoid That.

Books Always Speak Of Other Books.

It Comes Down To A Question Of Attention: It's Difficult To Use The Net Distractedly, Unlike The Television Or The Radio.

The Question Of Manuscript Changes Is Very Important For Literary Criticism, The Psychology Of Creation And Other Aspects Of The Study Of Literature.

In The Construction Of Immortal Fame You Need First Of All A Cosmic Shamelessness.

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.

Does The Novel Have To Deepen The Psychology Of Its Heroes? Certainly The Modern Novel Does, But The Ancient Legends Did Not Do The Same. Oedipus' Psychology Was Deduced By Aeschylus Or Freud, But The Character Is Simply There, Fixed In A Pure And Terribly Disquieting State.

Books Are Not Made To Be Believed, But To Be Subjected To Inquiry. When We Consider A Book, We Mustn't Ask Ourselves What It Says But What It Means.

Political Satire Is A Serious Thing. In Democratic Newspapers Throughout The World There Are Daily Cartoons That Often Are Not Even Funny, As Is The Case Especially In Many English-language Newspapers. Instead, They Contain A Political Message, And The Artist Takes Full Responsibility.

I Felt No Passion, No Jealousy, No Nostalgia. I Was Hollow, Clear-headed, Clean, And As Emotionless As An Aluminum Pot.

If You Want To Use Television To Teach Somebody, You Must First Teach Them How To Use Television.

Memory Is A Stopgap For Humans, For Whom Time Flies And What Is Passed Is Passed.

Poetry Is Not A Matter Of Feelings, It Is A Matter Of Language. It Is Language Which Creates Feelings.

But The Purpose Of A Story Is To Teach And To Please At Once, And What It Teaches Is How To Recognize The Snares Of The World.

The Only Truth Lies In Learning To Free Ourselves From Insane Passion For The Truth.

You Cannot Escape One Infinite, I Told Myself, By Fleeing To Another. You Cannot Escape The Revelation Of The Identical By Taking Refuge In The Illusion Of The Multiple.

A Book Is A Fragile Creature. It Suffers The Wear Of Time, It Fears Rodents, The Elements, Clumsy Hands.

The Poets Did Not Win; The Philosophers Surrendered.

All Poets Write Bad Poetry. Bad Poets Publish Them, Good Poets Burn Them.

There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino Said, ‘when I Was Not Prey To The Temptations Of This World, I Devoted My Nights To Imagining Other Worlds. A Bit With The Help Of Wine, And A Bit With That Of The Green Honey. There Is Nothing Better Than Imagining Other Worlds,’ He Said, ‘to Forget The Painful One We Live In. At Least So I Thought Then. I Hadn’t Yet Realized That, Imagining Other Worlds, You End Up Changing This One.

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.

History Is Rich With Adventurous Men, Long On Charisma, With A Highly Developed Instinct For Their Own Interests, Who Have Pursued Personal Power - Bypassing Parliaments And Constitutions, Distributing Favours To Their Minions, And Conflating Their Own Desires With The Interests Of The Community.

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.

The Good Of A Book Lies In Its Being Read. A Book Is Made Up Of Signs That Speak Of Other Signs, Which In Their Turn Speak Of Things. Without An Eye To Read Them, A Book Contains Signs That Produce No Concepts; Therefore It Is Dumb.

There Must Be A Connection Between The Lust For Power And Impotentia Coeundi. I Liked Marx, I Was Sure That He And His Jenny Had Made Love Merrily. You Can Feel It In The Easy Pace Of His Prose And In His Humor. On The Other Hand, I Remember Remarking One Day In The Corridors Of The University That If You Screwed Krupskaya All The Time, You'd End Up Writing A Lousy Book Like Materialism And Empiriocriticism.

The First Quality Of An Honest Man Is Contempt For Religion, Which Would Have Us Afraid Of The Most Natural Thing In The World, Which Is Death; And Would Have Us Hate The One Beautiful Thing Destiny Has Given Us, Which Is Life.

I Was In A Maze. No Matter Which Way I Turned, It Was The Wrong Way.

"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.

A Novel Is A Machine For Generating Interpretations.

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.

Western Culture

When You Are On The Dancefloor, There Is Nothing To Do But Dance.

I Felt Like Poisoning A Monk.

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