Mason Cooley Quotes

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

Memory feeds imagination.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.

It is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.

But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished.

Memory is a strange Bell—Jubilee, and Knell.

Memory demands an image.

Memory. My poison, my food.

The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.

Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

We all remember things, it's what we remember that determines how we live.

Some people say they use images to help them remember intricacies. Others say they just remember. If they are able to form an image of the face, it is because they remember how it was: it is not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

Vision sometimes comes in a memory.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

Imagination is merely the exploitation of our memory.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

The more we see the more we must be able to imagine, and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.