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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.

— Umberto Eco Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994)

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More quotes by Umberto Eco

A philosophy has a practical power: it contributes to the changing of the world.

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)

Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist.

Ur-Fascism (1995)

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.

Indeterminacy, complementarity, noncausality are not modes of being in the physical world, but systems for describing it in a convenient way.

The Role of the Reader : Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (1979)

One should not have the arrogance to declare that God does not exist.

All Umberto Eco quotes →

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Umberto Eco (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.