Mason Cooley Quotes

Disillusionment is not truth.

Shaw writes as if it were always midday.

Lonely people console themselves with self-absorption or curiosity.

The prison is the state writ small.

The question you're not supposed to ask is the important one.

Comedy is hostile to profundity, and brings everything to the surface.

An illicit love affair seems sweetly old-fashioned in the age of one night stands and orgies.

Only the broken-hearted know the truth about love.

The price of telling your troubles is having to listen to advice.

Matter-of-fact descriptions make the improbable seem real.

People believe that photographs are true and therefore cannot be art.

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

Dutch painting: daily life is enough.

Lies save trouble now, but may return in thunder and lightning.

Change is upsetting. Repetition is tedious. Three cheers for variation!

Observe decorum, and it will open a path to morality.

With age, the mind grows slower and more wily.

In comedy, the witty style wins out over every mishap of the plot.

Our detachments move us toward freedom and death.

Flatter me, but delicately, please, for I am fastidious.

Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening.

Scholars dream of finding small facts pregnant with great progeny.

I resist change even as I call for it.

Old age learns about less after a lifetime of more.

Jealousy is inconsolable because it cannot know the beloved

A moratorium on opportunities, please. I need to recover from the last one.

Beggars market their incapacity.

It is not confused. We are.

Violence stops thought. Hence its popularity as a pain-killer.

All anger feels like righteous anger; sorrow does not care whether it is righteous or not.

I am kept in bondage by the moles of my beloved.

When you feel protective toward your parents, you have become an adult.

People who abhor solitude may abhor company almost as much.

Sex is not imaginary, but it is not quite real either.

God makes the covenant, and observes it as He pleases.

I feel disappointed, but I don't remember just what I expected.

When a modest man praises himself, people listen.

To remain mysterious, say little and do nothing.

Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.

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

A real idea keeps changing and appears in many places.

Alone, I am drunk on my thoughts; in company, I am sober again.

Reversing a proposition rearranges its terms, but still keeps out new terms.

Death promises nothing--not even oblivion.

Why is it forbidden in New York to acknowledge the charm and beauty of Los Angeles?

Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism.

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

The ugly can achieve an absoluteness beyond the reach of beauty.