Life & Wisdom Quote by Mason Cooley

Reading turns sane adults into volunteers for beautiful delusions. Cooley’s line flatters the reader, then quietly indicts them: the moment you open a book, you’re not merely receiving information, you’re consenting to an illusion with consequences. Don Quixote is the patron saint of interpretive overcommitment, a man who reads so intensely he starts living inside the genre. Cooley’s point isn’t that readers are foolish; it’s that the act of reading always asks for a controlled kind of madness, a willingness to mistake marks on a page for a world worth reacting to.

The intent is slyly democratic. Not "some readers", not "naive readers" - all of us. Even the most sophisticated critic, armed with theory and skepticism, still performs the central Quixotic leap: we empathize with strangers, fear for invented bodies, root for outcomes that cannot touch us materially. We let language recruit our nervous systems. That’s the subtext: reading is not passive; it’s an embodied role-play where imagination does what ideology often does in public life - supplies a script, casts us, and makes the script feel inevitable.

Context matters: Cooley, a master of aphorism, compresses a whole argument about modern subjectivity into eight words. In an era saturated with media, the line lands as both celebration and warning. If reading makes Quixotes, it also makes citizens vulnerable to narrative glamour - the urge to see giants where there are windmills, and windmills where there are giants. The charm of the sentence is that it keeps both truths in play: literature as enchantment, and enchantment as risk.