Top 1384 Quotes & Sayings by Mason Cooley - Page 22
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Mason Cooley.
Last updated on April 21, 2025.
Language cannot say everything, fortunately.
Faith no doubt moves mountains, but not necessarily to where we want them.
Comedy defends the commonplace; tragedy explodes it.
Against classical philosophy: thinking about eternity or the immensity of the universe does not lessen my unhappiness.
When appearance and reality coincide, philosophy and literary criticism find themselves with nothing to say.
History goes out of control almost as often as nature does.
Profundity often goes past the issue to some deep but useless truth.
Vicarious living is only slightly less impossible than vicarious eating.
In philosophy, the principles are more interesting than the examples. In literature, the examples are more interesting than the principles.
Universal truths have become an embarrassment, but they won't quite go away.
Don't tell me it's raining when you're peeing on me!
Full of troubles, the mind is still the only Garden of Delight.
Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?
The intimacy of love absolves us of our guilty separateness.
The nature of language may determine what most people say, but I always speak my own meaning.
My mind no longer has romantic abysses, but has become shallow, with many little gaps and cracks.
The truths I shun follow me, mumbling.
Life just keeps unfolding, ignoring our praise or blame.
Reversing a proposition rearranges its terms, but still keeps out new terms.
Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.
In the present age, a man with harmonious ideas is regarded as out of touch.
Birth dates and bathroom scales tell more truth than I want to know.
Somehow the body keeps life going despite the ravaging negations of the mind.
The avant-garde is now stranded in the past.
Life is the risk we cannot refuse.
The truth usually has a slightly ugly look.
Whatever is spoken of acquires a certain existence.
Life is struggle and sleep.
I am plain-speaking out of both sides of my mouth.
When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.
Awakening in the morning returns us to life, and to awareness of death.
Life is what it makes you.
Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas.
Even in the midst of love-making, writers are working on the description.
Avid readers are enchanted by meaning, which is available chiefly in books.
Writing is a refuge from unhappiness, but has its own sorrows.
I regret. I apologize. I blame myself. I continue as before.
What I eat turns into my body. What I read turns into my mind.
Reading about ethics is about as likely to improve one's behavior as reading about sports is to make one into an athlete.
I dream of summing everything up in the greatest sentence ever written.
The privacy of reading frees us to entertain the alien.
Readers transform a library from a mausoleum into many theaters.
Show enough regret, and your refusal will inspire gratitude.
I read here and there in books, enjoying the examples and ignoring the argument.
When my expectations are exactly fulfilled, I feel that something uncanny has happened.
Reading more than life teaches us to recognize ethos and pathos.
Reading civilized the inner life.
Always leave room for the reader to supply meanings.
The writer is always courted by invitations from the all-too- familiar.
Even in writing an annual report, the unconscious plays a role.
The writer considers sayability before anything else.
Most self-laceration is more noisy than painful.
Regret leads to overeating and naps.
If I had found the words I was looking for, I would not have read so much.
Writers tell more truths, and more lies, than most.
Reading a great book causes jolts and frights.
I am most drawn to writing when I have something else urgent to do.
Perhaps fortunately, no one has ever found out what it would be like to have all his wishes fulfilled.
If you do not throw in a few promises of better things to come, gloomy one, I am going to take you back to the library.
Sex and writing live on playful cruelties.
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