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Life Quotes by Mason Cooley

67 Life quotes by Mason Cooley

All Life quotes Mason Cooley’s page

Cooley’s claim that money comes to life as it is spent hints that value grows with use. He notes that vacations reveal how a life of constant pleasure can feel overrated, and he reminds us that life itself is a risk we cannot refuse. He also suggests that meaning appears only when we look for it, not automatically.

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Commitments, not feelings, hold life together.

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I love you in my dreams, but not in real life.

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Living too long exacts a painful price.

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While there's life, there's fear.

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Life is struggle and sleep.

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The suburbs: signs of life, but no proofs.

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Money comes to life as it is spent.

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Life is always rich, thought only occasionally so.

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Everyone knows that (1) happiness is the goal of life, and (2) happiness is a chimera.

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Anybody can lead a frivolous life. A frivolous writer, however, must have taste and intelligence.

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Life is used up all the same, whether we save, spend, or waste it.

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

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In art, a dress is never just a dress; nor in life either.

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Not romance but companionship makes the happiness of daily life.

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If you should ever acknowledge my existence, I plan to snub you.

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I create my social existence by earning and spending.

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

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Life is what it makes you.

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Reading civilized the inner life.

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Wit saves us from being swallowed whole by life.

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Thought maps existence; fantasy colors it.

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Whatever is spoken of acquires a certain existence.

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Dutch painting: daily life is enough.

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Life is the risk we cannot refuse.

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Old age likes indecency. It's a sign of life.

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Why not - is a slogan for an interesting life.

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The Simple Life is not a simple life.

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I like what I do for a living. I also like NOT doing it--perhaps even more.

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The Insignificance of Man is a congenial theme; my own insignificance is a sore point.

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Life just keeps unfolding, ignoring our praise or blame.

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

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

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

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

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Whether I give to a beggar or not, his existence puts me in the wrong.

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The squabbles of philandering Zeus and shrewish Hera are the Greeks' comment on married life.

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Awakening in the morning returns us to life, and to awareness of death.

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The dignified catastrophes of tragedy bear little resemblance to the slow ruin inflicted by life.

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Once wealth and beauty are gone, there is always rural life.

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

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More by Mason Cooley

Nostalgia keeps dissolving the ironic narratives in which I have contained my past.

The modernist writers found despair inspirational.

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

Money comes to life as it is spent.

Even the most fickle are faithful to a few bad habits.

Rage is exciting, but leaves me confused and exhausted.

Literary tradition is full of lies about poverty-the jolly beggar, the poor but happy milkmaid, the wholesome diet of porridge, etc.

Experience teaches us, but we scarcely know what.

The body has a mind of its own.

In retirement, I look for days off from my days off. Mason Cooley

My intentions go one way, my desires another. Thus I feel both self-indulgent and deprived.

The Puritan sours his pleasures by disguising them as duties.

Unlike the actual, the fictional explains itself.

Vacations prove that a life of pleasure is overrated.

Outside literature, high-flown sentiments are merely exasperating.