Quotes from Mason Cooley

Lack of reciprocity ruins friendships, but makes love affairs exciting for a time.

Reading civilized the inner life.

Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on its own.

Small faults and virtues are for daily life. The big ones are for emergencies.

The life of pleasure breeds boredom. The life of duty breeds resentment.

The Ordinary Life: the misery seems planned, the happiness accidental.

Modernism: the books are as hard to understand as life itself.

Wit saves us from being swallowed whole by life.

Habit keeps my life going, with occasional pushes from desire.

As I review my life, I feel I must have missed the point, either then or now.

Nothing goes sour more easily than the life of pleasure.

If I could do my life over, I would try to cleanse at least my pleasures of self-pity.

Early every morning an old woman goes to the market to curse a grocery clerk, who curses back.

Dutch painting: daily life is enough.

Healthy vanity sweeps through life. Sickly vanity lies in bed.

While there's life, there's fear.

Life is always rich, thought only occasionally so.

The imaginary audience for my life is growing small and silent.

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

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

Unlike life, when books become meaningless, they are making a point.

Why do we never expect dull people to be rascals?

Documents create a paper reality we call proof.

The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul.