"The mark of a living thing is to be involved in opposites (impossibilities): the living cell that has to be continually adapting itself to stay alive, with its identity"
About this Quote
That parenthetical “(impossibilities)” does sly work. It suggests that what feels logically incoherent in language is simply the normal condition of being alive. We want clean categories: adaptation versus integrity, openness versus boundary, flux versus selfhood. Mosley insists those binaries are fantasies that living systems routinely violate. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to any politics or psychology that promises wholeness without conflict: ideologies of purity, personal brands built on coherence, even self-help narratives that treat contradiction as a bug to be debugged.
As a novelist, Mosley’s stake is craft as much as philosophy. Fiction lives on precisely these “opposites”: characters who desire incompatible things, plots that force change while claiming continuity, narrators who both reveal and conceal. The sentence reads like a manifesto for complexity - not as ornament, but as proof of pulse. To be alive is to be unfinished, and to keep your name anyway.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Mosley, Nicholas. (2026, January 16). The mark of a living thing is to be involved in opposites (impossibilities): the living cell that has to be continually adapting itself to stay alive, with its identity. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-mark-of-a-living-thing-is-to-be-involved-in-123015/
Chicago Style
Mosley, Nicholas. "The mark of a living thing is to be involved in opposites (impossibilities): the living cell that has to be continually adapting itself to stay alive, with its identity." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-mark-of-a-living-thing-is-to-be-involved-in-123015/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The mark of a living thing is to be involved in opposites (impossibilities): the living cell that has to be continually adapting itself to stay alive, with its identity." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-mark-of-a-living-thing-is-to-be-involved-in-123015/. Accessed 24 Feb. 2026.









