Mason Cooley Quotes

Clouds of flavors and savors float around the thing-in-itself.

Thrift is an attractive idea until you get down to specifics.

F. Scott Fitzgerald thought that prolonging his adolescence would protect his talent.

To learn a vocation, you also have to learn the frauds it practices and the promises it breaks.

Since events are not metaphors, the literal-minded have a certain advantage in dealing with them.

I want to appear ordinary, but I have it understood that I am not.

Many count on their disadvantages to cover for them.

A suburb is an attempt to get out of reach of the city without having the city be out of reach.

Excrement can never be culturally elaborated to the extent that nutriment can.

The horizon is more than a convention of landscape painting, less than truth.

Now defined as art, the totem has lost cult, taboo, and custom.

Even the most abject have a sense of superiority based on powerful though undefined merits.

Wallace Stevens: the Platonist celebrates endless change, but with regret.

Scholarship can find little to say about the obvious.

Hatred of the mother is familiar, but the mother's hatred still comes as a surprise.

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

My parents wanted me to solace them for sorrows they denied having had.

The man in the street is always a stranger.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

Old age: I fall asleep during the funerals of my friends.

Old and young disbelieve one another's truths.

People believe that photographs are true and therefore cannot be art.

Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run.

Staid middle age loves the hurricane passions of opera.

Stated clearly enough, an idea may cancel itself out.

The horse stares at its captor, barely remembering the free kicks of youth.

Why do we never expect dull people to be rascals?

Young men preen. Old men scheme.

Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference.

If I can't serve as a role model, let me serve as a warning.

silence is the most intolerable of answers.

Writing about an idea frees me of it. Thinking about it is a circle of repetitions.

Don't sacrifice yourself for me. I will not be grateful.

Drugs bring us to to the gates of paradise, then keep us from entering.

Dancers dance through their pain I shrink from mine.

If success is a habit, it is a hard one to acquire.

Old photograph: amid the set poses of her family, a young girl smiles and raises her hand a little.

Who would not give up wit for power and beauty?

Children use all their wiles to get their way with adults. Adults do the same with children.

In the street, the gaze of desire is furtive or menacing.

In every death, a busy world comes to an end.

Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey.

In an aphorism, aptness counts for more than truth.

Lonely people keep up a ceaseless flow of commentary on themselves.

Scepticism is always a back road leading to some credo or other.

Generosity knows how to count, but refrains.

Interpreting the dance: young women in white dancing in a ring can only be virgins; old women in black dancing in a ring can only be witches; but middle-aged women in colors, square dancing...?

We make some changes. But mostly changes make us.

Change often makes accepted customs into crimes.

Many try to force the past to change.