What book would you love to be able to read again for the first time?
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Crossing the divide between reason and faith. Celebrating the love of the book. A mystery to unravel with echoes back to the grand master Holmes. Would relish the opportunity to read it all again for the first time for these reasons pulled from the text:
"How peaceful life would be without love, Adso. How safe, how tranquil... and how dull."
"Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry."
"For what I saw at the abbey then (and will now recount) caused me to think that often inquisitors create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics where these do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven to share in it, in their hatred for the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the Devil. God preserve us."
"Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened._ "Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height."
"Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn't interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave. . . ."
"I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand is the relation among signs . . . I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe."_ "But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something. . . ."_ "What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. 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 . . . The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away."
"Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth."
