Mason Cooley Quotes

I am plain-speaking out of both sides of my mouth.

Universal truths have become an embarrassment, but they won't quite go away.

The truths I shun follow me, mumbling.

The truth usually has a slightly ugly look.

Against classical philosophy: thinking about eternity or the immensity of the universe does not lessen my unhappiness.

Whatever is spoken of acquires a certain existence.

Somehow the body keeps life going despite the ravaging negations of the mind.

The intimacy of love absolves us of our guilty separateness.

Perhaps fortunately, no one has ever found out what it would be like to have all his wishes fulfilled.

If I had found the words I was looking for, I would not have read so much.

Reading about ethics is about as likely to improve one's behavior as reading about sports is to make one into an athlete.

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.

The privacy of reading frees us to entertain the alien.

I dream of summing everything up in the greatest sentence ever written.

Even in the midst of love-making, writers are working on the description.

Lead the reader toward the thought, then stop a little short.

The Muses inspire art and pretend not to notice when Mammon buys it.

Outside literature, high-flown sentiments are merely exasperating.

No need to be sentimental to mourn the loss of Paradise.

Cheap thrill: moral outrage revels in its own innocence and in the guilt of the wicked Others.

My father liked to moralize, and so do I. But he was in earnest, while I am embarrassed and pretend that I am merely being witty.

A fastidious taste is best indoors, away from nature and the city.

Original sin reassures us that our slip was not the first.

Proverbial wisdom counsels against risk and change. But sitting ducks fare worst of all.

Self-absorption intensifies isolation, but permits it to go unnoticed.

Loneliness is more likely to lead to fussy housekeeping than to grand views of the Universe.

Curiosity makes loneliness.

Lonely people console themselves with self-absorption or curiosity.

We take refuge in illness and then are trapped there.

Satire is born of the cities it denounces.

Literature gives us a memory of lives we did not lead.

Let's have some good, old-fashioned literature, with a virgin and a moral.

The desire to create literature leads to frights, grunts, and coy looks.

Literature may be false, but it is not trivial.

Go ahead and voice your criticisms, but don't expect to be invited back.

Rule of criticism: only attend to the shape, and the purpose will manifest itself.

A critic who uses new quotations is making important changes.

Self-esteem is not based on itself.

Our detachments move us toward freedom and death.

The pointless ferocities of intellectual life shock businessmen, who kill only to eat.

Technique bridges among ideas, and sometimes generates them.

Rule of science: only exclude purpose, and Nature will reveal her causes.

The right time to die is never exactly now.

Death promises nothing--not even oblivion.

Only death rescues us from dying.

Death is just around the corner. If only it would stay there.

Death is always there, just beneath the surface.

The wretchedness of failure is the great attraction of success.

Failures are easier to repeat than successes.

Small successes are still successes; great failures are still failures.