Mason Cooley Quotes

To avoid doing anything, wait for the right circumstances.

Treat unhappiness as a defect and fewer would embrace it.

Call on literary convention, and it will gladly tell your story for you.

Curiosity, easily frightened, takes refuge in puzzles, murder mysteries, and spectator sports.

If we think about the obvious long enough, it dissolves.

Unemployment diminishes people. Leisure enlarges them.

The aphorism: a platitude that swerves, or slides all the way around.

Scholarship can find little to say about the obvious.

Art can make chaos seductive.

The Media: bold sex and violence, timid politics and morals.

The past is always waiting to entangle and deflect us.

Envy awakens at the sound of a distant laugh.

Few friendships could survive the moodiness of love affairs.

Other people's beliefs may be myths, but not mine.

Consciousness is our only reprieve from Time.

Self-inflicted misery smirks under its crown of thorns.

We take refuge in illness and then are trapped there.

Saying "I feel guilty" is a mere form of words. Saying "I feel ashamed" is not.

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen: even less, the trouble I've successfully avoided.

My mind is led astray by every faint rustle.

The villain may be good looking, but his smile is never quite right.

When disaster waves, I try not to wave back.

Rescue someone unwilling to look after himself, and he will cling to you like a dangerous illness.

When love ends, the beloved is no longer standing on a pedestal, but in a hole.

Whether I give to a beggar or not, his existence puts me in the wrong.

Of course I want to be good, but that may not be to your advantage.

The dignified catastrophes of tragedy bear little resemblance to the slow ruin inflicted by life.

Alone, lonely people talk to themselves. In company, they often continue.

Every lover's lament has an element of boasting.

Every life has a love story, even though the beloved may be imaginary, or a cat.

The perfect aphorism would achieve classical balance and then immediately upset it.

A modest demeanor arouses thoughts of seduction.

Consensus is usually made possible by vague language and shallow commitments.

Desire is wakeful; satisfaction dozes.

Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.

The right time to die is never exactly now.

Sometimes the given seems like something taken away.

Worried about being a dull fellow? You might develop your talent for being irritating.

Interpreting the dance: young women in white dancing in a ring can only be virgins; old women in black dancing in a ring can only be witches; but middle-aged women in colors, square dancing...?

Working cuts down on both folly and wisdom.

The beginning of self-knowledge: recognizing that your motives are the same as other people's.

I trust you because I need you.

Perhaps fortunately, no one has ever found out what it would be like to have all his wishes fulfilled.

Conscious thought is the tidying up at the end.

Some loves are like a vice that has ceased to give pleasure.

God improvises. Man systematizes.

People invent gods to explain their suffering.

If I can't serve as a role model, let me serve as a warning.