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"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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"Ma'am,' Augustus said, nodding toward her, 'your daughter's car has just been deservedly egged by a blind man. Please close the door and go back inside or we'll be forced to call the police.' After wavering for a moment, Monica's mom closed the door and disappeared."

"At this, Gansey rolled over onto his back and folded his hands on his chest. He wore a salmon polo shirt, which, in Blue's opinion, was far more hellish than anything they'd discussed to this point."

"I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointments in the Department of Having a Voice that Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin."

"What is it with you today? says Christina on the way to breakfast. Her eyes are stillswollen from sleep and her tangled hair forms a fuzzy halo around her face."Oh, you know, I say. "Sun shining. Birds chirping.She raises an eyebrow at me, as if reminding me that we are in an undergroundtunnel."

"In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then people not having socially appropriate responses, having people denying the drama by failing to react to it, and that's a really classic form of humor."

"I just don't- Ronan. My ears are bleeding!"Ronan turned down the music."

"Ben, if you get pee in my brand-new car, I am going to cut your balls off."Still peeing, Ben looks over at me smirking. "You re gonna need a hell of a big knife, bro."
Explore more quotes by Umberto Eco


"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."


"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."


"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."


"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."


"Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings."


"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."


"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."


"Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow."


"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."


"I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed."
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