Quote collection
368 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation."
"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."
"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."
"A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands."
"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."
"I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake."
"If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity."
"The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came."
"It is obvious that the newspaper produces the opinion of the readers."
"I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it)."
"A secret is powerful when it is empty."
"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."
"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."
"The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia."
"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."
"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."
"What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible."
"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."
"History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error."