Mason Cooley Quotes

Arrogance frowns; pride smiles.

If you do not throw in a few promises of better things to come, gloomy one, I am going to take you back to the library.

After ages of bombast, the rhetoric of virtue has become ironic and shy.

With age, comfort becomes more seductive than beauty.

Withhold admiration from a narcissist and be disliked. Give it and be treated with indifference.

Every farewell combines loss and new freedom.

I am the center of the world, but the control panel seems to be somewhere else.

Life is used up all the same, whether we save, spend, or waste it.

Our public monuments are memorials to the Enlightenment.

English has borrowed from everywhere and now goes everywhere.

Modern literature seduces with insults, riddles, and inside stories.

The Ancient Mariner seizes the guest at the wedding feast and will not let go until he has told all his story: the prototype of the bore.

Telescopes and binoculars endanger the ever-distant sublime.

Faith no doubt moves mountains, but not necessarily to where we want them.

What I eat turns into my body. What I read turns into my mind.

Truth-telling frightens me. Lying confuses me.

Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference.

The young have stolen our youthfulness, and flaunt it without shame.

Style disdains comfort and is always ready to sacrifice virtue.

My nostalgia is for the impossible.

Nothing goes sour more easily than the life of pleasure.

Money gives me more energy than all the Granola bars in the world.

Love talks and talks. Lust is brief and to the point.

The transcendental promises a vacation from history.

Dreams surround our desires with ugliness and dread.

Literary tradition is full of lies about poverty-the jolly beggar, the poor but happy milkmaid, the wholesome diet of porridge, etc.

Bored by safety, the lover grows jealous and exacting.

I reject all evidence that my fabulous beloved is an ordinary person who worries, watches TV, and has bouts of indigestion.

The passion for money is never fickle.

Curiosity makes loneliness.

Melancholy is as seductive as Ecstasy.

Adrenalin dispels boredom. Run, you sufferers from ennui! Run for your lives!

Poor but happy is not a phrase invented by a poor person.

Original sin reassures us that our slip was not the first.

Growth provides novel experiences for youth; decay the same, alas, for age.

Good books do not make people wiser or happier--only more conscious.

Lovers do all the talking and writing. What are the Beloveds thinking?

Hatred of the mother is familiar, but the mother's hatred still comes as a surprise.

In New York, one must collapse to be indolent.

New York loves itself in an unkind and fanatical way.

The lyric deals with love and sorrow, the aphorism with contradiction and deceit.

To avoid tripping on the chain of the past, you have to pick it up and wind it about you.

Everyone knows that (1) happiness is the goal of life, and (2) happiness is a chimera.

Only those in comfortable circumstances think love is the most important thing.

The writer is always courted by invitations from the all-too- familiar.

Modernized by tin roofs and T-shirts, Third World poverty is no longer picturesque.

I like the old wisdom--puns, riddles, spells, proverbs.

I was once in love with books. Now they go their way and I go mine.