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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.

-Umberto Eco

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There Is Only One

Umberto Eco

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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.

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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.

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Until Then I Had Thought Each Book Spoke Of The Things, Human Or Divine, That Lie Outside Books. Now I Realized That Not Infrequently Books Speak Of Books: It Is As If They Spoke Among Themselves. In The Light Of This Reflection, The Library Seemed All The More Disturbing To Me. It Was Then The Place Of A Long, Centuries-old Murmuring, An Imperceptible Dialogue Between One Parchment And Another, A Living Thing, A Receptacle Of Powers Not To Be Ruled By A Human Mind, A Treausre Of Secrets Emanated By Many Minds, Surviving The Death Of Those Who Had Produced Them Or Had Been Their Conveyors.

If Photography Is To Be Likened To Perception, This Is Not Because The Former Is A Natural Process But Because The Latter Is Also Coded.

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.

It Is Psychologically Very Hard To Go Through Life Without The Justification, And The Hope, Provided By Religion.

Stopgaps Do Belong To The Internal Economy Of The Form, Since The Whole Requires Them, Even If Only In A Subordinate Position ... The Stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' Accepts Its Own Banality, Because Without The Speed That The Banal Allows Up, It Would Slow Up A Passage That Is Crucial For The Outcome Of The Work And Its Interpretation.

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

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.

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.

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

New Orleans Is Not In The Grip Of A Neurosis Of A Denied Past; It Passes Out Memories Generously Like A Great Lord; It Doesn't Have To Pursue "the Real Thing."

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.

I Believe That You Can Reach The Point Where There Is No Longer Any Difference Between Developing The Habit Of Pretending To Believe And Developing The Habit Of Believing.

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

Yes, I Know, It's Not The Truth, But In A Great History Little Truths Can Be Altered So That The Greater Truth Emerges.

Even Today, I Frequently Meet Scientists Who, Outside Their Own Narrow Discipline, Are Superstitious.

I Developed A Passion For The Middle Ages The Same Way Some People Develop A Passion For Coconuts.

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.

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

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

I Suspect That There Is No Serious Scholar Who Doesn’t Like To Watch Television. I’m Just The Only One Who Confesses.

One Of The Problems I Have Always Discussed Is The Refusal To Distinguish Between Comment And Fact. The Newspaper Wraps Every Fact Into A Comment. It Is Impossible To Give Mere Fact Without Establishing Point Of View.

It Was Awkward, Revisiting A World You Have Never Seen Before: Like Coming Home, After A Long Journey, To Someone Else’s House.

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.

A Sure Sign Of A Lunatic Is That Sooner Or Later, He Brings Up The Templars.

Sooner Or Later

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.

I Have Lost The Freedom Of Not Having An Opinion.

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

Freedom Of Speech

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

After So Many Years Even The Fire Of Passion Dies, And With It What Was Believed The Light Of The Truth. Who Of Us Is Able To Say Now Whether Hector Or Achilles Was Right, Agamemnon Or Priam, When They Fought Over The Beauty Of A Woman Who Is Now Dust And Ashes?

The Hand Of God Creates; It Does Not Conceal.

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

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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I Feel That I Am A Scholar Who Only With The Left Hand Writes Novels.

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

What Is Life If Not The Shadow Of A Fleeting Dream?

Libraries Can Take The Place Of God.

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

Telling The Truth

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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.

Jacopo Belbo Didnt Understand That He Had Had His Moment And That It Would Have To Be Enough For Him, For All His Life. Not Recognizing It, He Spent The Rest Of His Days Seeking Something Else, Until He Damned Himself.

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Not Bad, Not Bad At All," Diotallevi Said. "to Arrive At The Truth Through The Painstaking Reconstruction Of A False Text.

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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.

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.

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In The United States There's A Puritan Ethic And A Mythology Of Success. He Who Is Successful Is Good. In Latin Countries, In Catholic Countries, A Successful Person Is A Sinner.

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.

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

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

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Black And White

The Roseicrucians Were Everywhere, Aided By The Fact That They Didn't Exist.

Love Flourishes In Expectation. Expectation Strolls Through The Spacious Fields Of Time Towards Opportunity.

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

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.

Homer's Work Hits Again And Again On The Topos Of The Inexpressible. People Will Always Do That.

Again And Again

Ugliness Is More Inventive Than Beauty. Beauty Always Follows Certain Camps. I Think It's More Amusing - Ugliness - Than Beauty.

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

All The Blogs, Facebook, Twitter Are Made By People Who Want To Show Their Own Private Affairs At The Price Of Making Fakes, To Try To Appear Such As They Are Not, To Construct Another Personality, Which Is A Veritable Loss Of Identity.

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.

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

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.

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As A Scholar I Am Interested In The Philosophy Of Language, Semiotics, Call It What You Want, And One Of The Main Features Of The Human Language Is The Possibility Of Lying.

It Is Sometimes Hard To Grasp The Difference Between Identifying With One's Own Roots, Understanding People With Other Roots, And Judging What Is Good Or Bad.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Author Should Die Once He Has Finished Writing. So As Not To Trouble The Path Of The Text.

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.

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.

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Books Always Speak Of Other Books.

I Love The Secrecy Of Writing Fiction. When I Write A Novel, I Don't Tell Anybody What I'm Doing. I'm Living In My Private World. And It's A Great Sensation.

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 Think Of Myself As A Serious Professor Who, During The Weekend, Writes Novels.

They Say That A Cat, If It Falls From A Window And Hits Its Nose, Can Lose Its Sense Of Smell And Then, Because Cats Live By Their Ability To Smell, It Can No Longer Recognize Things. I'm A Cat That Hit Its Nose.

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.

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

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.

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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.

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

Simple Mechanisms Do Not Love.

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

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

The Poets Did Not Win; The Philosophers Surrendered.

You Must Overcome Any Shyness And Have A Conversation With The Librarian, Because He Can Offer You Reliable Advice That Will Save You Much Time. You Must Consider That The Librarian (if Not Overworked Or Neurotic) Is Happy When He Can Demonstrate Two Things: The Quality Of His Memory And Erudition And The Richness Of His Library, Especially If It Is Small. The More Isolated And Disregarded The Library, The More The Librarian Is Consumed With Sorrow For Its Underestimation. A Person Who Asks For Help Makes The Librarian Happy.

I Think A Book Should Be Judged 10 Years Later, After Reading And Re-reading It.

We Live For Books.

For What I Saw At The Abbey Then (and Will Now Recount) Caused Me To Think That Often Inquisitors Create Heretics. And Not Only In The Sense That They Imagine Heretics Where These Do Not Exist, But Also That Inquisitors Repress The Heretical Putrefaction So Vehemently That Many Are Driven To Share In It, In Their Hatred For The Judges. Truly, A Circle Conceived By The Devil. God Preserve Us.

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

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.

Because Of Lies, We Can Produce And Invent A Possible World.

I Seal That Which Was Not To Be Said In The Tomb That I Become.

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

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I Seem To Know All The Cliches, But Not How To Put Them Together In A Believable Way. Or Else These Stories Are Terrible And Grandiose Precisely Because All The Cliches Intertwine In An Unrealistic Way And You Can't Disentangle Them. But When You Actually Live A Cliche, It Feels Brand New, And You Are Unashamed.

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.

Every Man Is Obsessed By The Memories Of His Own Youth.

...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).

It Is Obvious That The Newspaper Produces The Opinion Of The Readers.

I Am A Professor Who Writes Novels On Sundays

My Poetry Had The Same Functional Origin And The Same Formal Configuration As Teenage Acne.

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.

Translation Is The Art Of Failure.

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.

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

We Live For Books. A Sweet Mission In This World Dominated By Disorder And Decay.

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.

There Are More Books In The World Than Hours In Which To Read Them. We Are Thus Deeply Influenced By Books We Haven't Read, That We Haven't Had The Time To Read.

A Library's Ideal Function Is To Be A Little Bit Like A Bouquiniste's Stall, A Place For Trouvailles.

Libraries Are Fascinating Places: Sometimes You Feel You Are Under The Canopy Of A Railway Station, And When You Read Books About Exotic Places There's A Feeling Of Travelling To Distant Lands

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I'm Always Fascinated By Losers. Also, In My "foucault's Pendulum," The Main Characters, Who Are In A Way Losers, They Are More Interesting Than The Winners.

I've Always Said That I Learned The English I Know Through Two Sources -- Marvel Comics And Finnegans Wake.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Socrates ... Did Not Write. It Seems Academically Obvious That He Perished Because He Did Not Publish!

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