Mason Cooley Quotes

The hysterical find too much significance in things. The depressed find too little.

Facts do not give advice.

Transcendence is something between a metaphor and a miracle.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has more threat than comfort.

Fastidious taste makes enjoyment a struggle.

Even in rapture, part of the mind watches.

I would like to be a figment of my own imagination, but belly and bowels will not permit.

I alternate between reading cook books and reading diet books.

Like love, destruction can be ecstatic.

Pornography supplies the only really safe sex.

Man invented the gods. Then the gods went off on their own, but not far.

Complainers rule out happiness, mentioning it only as something lost.

No one could be the way I remember my father.

silence is the most intolerable of answers.

The morose one refuses to smile even when he has just had his teeth cleaned.

Women encourage men to be childish, then scold them.

Sensuality takes planning and work.

What lies behind appearance is usually another appearance.

Satire is born of the cities it denounces.

Getting ready: the show girl scratches her breast and shakes out her feathers.

Mars and Venus are at it again. This time, Hephaestus is standing by with a private detective, a photographer, and a lawyer.

God may be a human creation, but He goes His way, not ours.

Victimization has its privileges, and I want some.

I'm being treated like a sex object, cried the lady. No matter. I will take care of it, said Time soothingly.

Always leave room for the reader to supply meanings.

The flesh of past lovers looks both familiar and strange.

Events are called inevitable only after they have occurred.

Everything changes as it is written down.

People are not the way they are primarily in order to annoy me.

Paradox likes contradictions with exits.

Studying the past may suggest new ways of going wrong.

Errors are more numerous than truths, but fortunately too divided among themselves to take power.

My taking a seat on the Council of the Fathers caused a desperate fluttering among my ghosts.

I am skeptical in principle, gullible in practice.

Robert Frost: plain, strong, simple, and mean.

I dream of summing everything up in the greatest sentence ever written.

A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude.

Conformity makes everything easier, if you can still breathe.

Death is just around the corner. If only it would stay there.

Mistrust makes life difficult. Trust makes it risky.

Moderation in all things is best, but it's pretty hard to get excited about it.

You gave me a significant look, but significant of what?

Excrement can never be culturally elaborated to the extent that nutriment can.

A: Everything changes. B: But not enough.

Beauty compels us; reason merely cajoles.

Belief forages, moving from pasture to pasture.

In the theater of confusion, knowing the location of the exits is what counts.

Unhappiness is too common to call for special measures.