"When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything."
"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."
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Source: Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Book by Umberto Eco, 1994.
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"If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot."
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"Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big."
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"There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four."