I Made Him Happy

"You were hastening his death, carrying him to the extreme frenzy, the consumption of all the senses. And you were satisfying your own taste for fairy tales: you were proud of your inventions."

"Perhaps. But for the short while he still lived, I made him happy."

A Place More Beautiful

"Is there perhaps any place more beautiful in the world than this, where, even if something ugly exists, you don't see it?" (pg. 340)

Good-for-Nothing

"I'm not a good-for-nothing like you, here one day and there the next -- a fine life you gentlemen have! People who think only about how to kill others, yet one day, if you tell them they have to die, they shit their pants." (pg. 272)

Power

"The fact is that a basileus can use his power to do good, but to hold on to his power he has to do evil." (Eco, pg. 245)

God is the Unique

"God is the Unique, and he is so perfect that he does not resemble any of the things that exist or any of the things that do not; you cannot describe him using your human intelligence, as if he were someone who becomes angry if you are bad or worries about you out of goodness, someone who has a mouth, ears, face, wings, or that is spirit, father or son, not even of himself. Of the Unique you cannot say he is or is not, he embraces all but is nothing; you can name him only through dissimilarity, because it is futile to call him Goodness, Beauty, Wisdom, Amiability, Power, Justice, it would be like calling him Bear, Panther, Serpent, Dragon, or Gryphon, because whatever you say of him you will never express him. God is not body, is not figure, is not form; he does not see, does not hear, does not know disorder and perturbation; he is not soul, intelligence, imagination, opinion, thought, word, number, order, size; he is not equality and is not inequality, is not time and is not eternity; he is a will without purpose. Try to understand, Baudolino: God is a lamp without flame, a flame without fire, a fire without heat, a dark light, a silent rumble, a blind flash, a luminous soot, a ray of his own darkness, a circle that expands concentrating on its own center, a solitary simplicity; he is...is..." She paused, seeking an example that would convince them both, she the teacher and he the pupil. "He is a space that is not, in which you and I are the same thing, as we are today in this time that doesn't flow." (Eco, pg. )

Imagining Other Worlds

"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." (Eco, pg. 99)

Tormented by the Muses

"You see," he said, "great poets are not always diarrhoic, sometimes they're styptic, and those are the greater ones. You must seem tormented by the Muses, able to distill only one couplet every now and then." (Eco, pg. 82)

Sailors and Theologians

"You don't have to be in a place in order to know everything about it," Abdul replied. "Otherwise sailors would be more learned than theologians." (Eco, pg. 77)

The Duty of Poets

"Rhetoric is the art of saying well that which may or may not be true, and it is the duty of poets to invent beautiful falsehoods." (Eco, pg. 55)

The Voice of Souls

"Can he have a soul, Niketas wondered, this character who can bend his narrative to express different souls? And if he has different souls, through which mouth, as he speaks, will he tell me the truth?" (Eco, Pg. 50)

The Dead Who Speak

"People will believe anything provided it's the dead who speak." (Eco, pg. 247)

Dress and Gold

"Kyot could have been one of those Lebanese who dress badly but have pockets full of gold pieces" (Eco, pg. 244)

Hate Your Neighbor

"That's how it is in our parts. You may hate the foreigner, but most of all you hate your neighbor. And if the foreigner helps us harm our neighbor, then he's welcome."

"But why?"

"Because people are wicked, as my father always said, but the people of Asti are worse than Barbarossa." (Eco, pg. 47)

A Man of Letters

"If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things." (Eco pg. 43)

Matters of Law

"Niketas had long since learned that the Latins, though they were barbarians, were extremely complicated, hopeless when it came to fine points and subtleties if a theological question was at stake, but capable of splitting a hair four ways on matters of law."

Questions of Government

"But this basileus of yours, this emperor, as you call him, was he crowned in Pavia or in Rome? And why in Italy, if he's the basileus of the Alamans?"

"One thing at a time, Master Niketas. For us Latins things aren't as simple as they are for you Romei. In your country someone gouges out the eyes of the current basileus, and he becomes basileus himself., everybody agrees, and even the patriarch of Constantinople does what the new basileus tells him, otherwise the basileus gouges out his eyes too."

"Now don't exaggerate."

"Exaggerate? Me? When I got here they told me right away that the basileus, Alexis III, ascended the throne because he'd blinded the legitimate ruler, his brother Isaac."

"Doesn't anybody ever eliminate his predecessor and seize the throne in your country?"

"Yes, but they kill him in battle, or with some poison, or with a dagger."

"You see? You people are barbarians. You can't imagine a less bloody way of managing questions of government. And besides, Isaac was Alexi's brother. Brother doesn't kill brother."

(Eco, pg. 32)

The Problem of My Life

"...the problem of my life is that I've always confused what I saw with what I wanted to see." 

(pg 30)

Maybe We Want Too Much

"Maybe we want too much," Rabbi Solomon said, "but at this point we can't help wanting it." (Eco, pg. 340)

No Imagination

"In any case, the time I'm now talking about, he went down very angry, ready for a hard war. With him was the marquess of Monferrato, as well as the cities of Alba, Acqui, Pavia, and Como..."

"But you just said that Pavia had gone over to the League?"

"Did I? Oh, yes, before. But in the meantime it had come back to the emperor."

"Oh, Lord!" Niketas cried, "our emperors dig each other's eyes out, but at least, as long as they see, we know whose side they are on....."

"You people have no imagination."

You See What a City Is?

"You see what a city is?" Ghini said to him. "And if it's like this before it's even finished, imagine what will happen afterwards: it's another life. Every day you see new people -- for the merchants, just think, it's like having the Heavenly Jerusalem; for the knights, since the emperor forbade them to sell lands so as not to divide the fief, and they were bored to death in the countryside, now they command companies of bowmen, they ride out in parades, they give orders left and right. But things don't prosper just for the gentry and the merchants: it's a providence also for a man like your father, who doesn't have much land but has some livestock, and people arrive in the city and ask him for stock and pay cash; they're beginning to sell for ready money and not through barter. I don't know if you understand what that means: if you exchange two chickens for three rabbits sooner or later you have to eat them, otherwise they grow too old, whereas two coins you can hide under you mattress and they're good ten years from now, and if you're lucky they stay there even if enemies come into your house. Besides, it's happened in Milan and in Lodi and Pavia, and it will also happen here with us: it's not that the the Ghinis or the Aularis have to keep their mouths shut and only the Guascos or the Trottis give the orders. We're all part of those who make the decisions: here you can become important even if you're not a noble, and this is the fine thing about a city, and it's specially fine for one who isn't noble, and is ready to get himself killed, if he really has to (but it's better not), because his sons can go around saying: My name is Ghini and even if your name is Trotti, you're still shit" (Eco, pgs. 162-163).