Mason Cooley Quotes

Rebuttals never alter desire.

The madness of love can always be suspended--to cook dinner or catch a plane, for instance.

Happiness is often hard-hearted.

We often mistake the original part of ourselves for a weakness.

In a strange city, I connect through food and fantasy.

Logic and fact keep interfering with the easy flow of conversation.

To make advice agreeable, try paradox or rhyme.

Let's have some good, old-fashioned literature, with a virgin and a moral.

I have a special grudge against those who have the same faults as I do.

Weakness is a better teacher than strength. Weakness must learn to understand the obstacles that strength brushes aside.

With every physical pain, my moral fibre unravels a little.

Politics inflame the passions in a way that few beloveds can match.

Glamour looks eloquent but seldom talks.

Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is.

Fantasy mirrors desire. Imagination reshapes it.

The sacred is found boring by many who find the uncanny fascinating.

Always assume that a lucky hit will not be repeated.

Death is always there, just beneath the surface.

Generosity knows how to count, but refrains.

Only death rescues us from dying.

The truth usually has a slightly ugly look.

The banker rubs his nose, thinking of his cat stalking something on the lawn.

Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder.

Lovers never want to say "I love you" at the same moment. Hence all the love stories.

In art, a dress is never just a dress; nor in life either.

A small boy puts his hand on the wall, and looks down intently as he wriggles his toes. The birth of thought?

Many have attempted unnatural acts, but Nature has always shown the way.

Reading gives you some place to go when you have to stay where you are.

Intuition is often mistaken, but not altogether.

I did not know I was in my prime until afterwards.

People are reluctant to cite boredom as grounds for divorce.

Every work of art changes its predecessors.

Early every morning an old woman goes to the market to curse a grocery clerk, who curses back.

My neglected duties crowd around me in my dreams, murmuring.

Originality is in the eye of the beholder.

Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.

Unconditional love is a lofty ideal, but unconditional hate is a fact well documented by history.

The suburbs: signs of life, but no proofs.

Stated clearly enough, an idea may cancel itself out.

Beautiful people are forgiven more often than the rest.

To be thoroughly modern, an aphorism should trail off vaguely rather than coming to a point.

Knowledge and power in the city; peace and decency in the country.

Cheap thrill: moral outrage revels in its own innocence and in the guilt of the wicked Others.

Sloth, not ill-will, makes me unjust.

The modernist writers found despair inspirational.

It's no good being exclusive if nobody wants in.

The privacy of reading frees us to entertain the alien.

Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story.