Mason Cooley Quotes

City wits, country humorists.

Fortuna smiles and frowns according to a timetable surprising even to herself.

Dreams are distorted representations of desire. So are dream- analyses.

The young are just as opinionated as the old, but have more exciting things to do than sit around airing their opinions all day.

In youth, love and art. In age, investments and antiques.

The young break rules for fun. The old for profit.

Desire is wakeful; satisfaction dozes.

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

Seek and Hide: the Lover gazes at the Beloved. The Beloved looks away. The Beloved turns and looks at the Lover. The Lover runs away.

Treat unhappiness as a defect and fewer would embrace it.

Existence is not a mystery unless you think it has a meaning.

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

Originality is in the eye of the beholder.

Home again, I can groan, scratch, and talk to myself.

Lawyers may reason powerfully, but power settles most issues.

The party out of office becomes the articulate one.

Everyone values the good nature of a man with a gun.

The more powerless people are, the longer they are kept waiting.

My strengths make me contemptuous. My weaknesses make me charitable.

Conformity makes everything easier, if you can still breathe.

Disappointment proves that expectations were mistaken.

We express disappointment in everything except ourselves.

As night falls, every joy glows brighter.

Progress may feel more like loss than gain.

In New York, pretending to be above the struggle means no seat on the bus and a table next to the kitchen.

New York loves itself in an unkind and fanatical way.

I create my social existence by earning and spending.

Self-analysis always cheats.

When I go out, I hope to leave the worst of myself at home.

My self-absorption warms me; yours boils me.

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

Snarls and sobs show that a love affair is getting serious.

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

The Lady: a fluty voice, sensible shoes, a melancholy sense of living by rules few still remember.

Which is the supplement? Fantasy or daily routine?

The aphorism sometimes casts off cynicism and expresses strong feeling.

The aphorism offers a momentary sense of mastery over some confusion or unhappiness.

Asceticism and celibacy can conceal many incapacities.

Being enthusiastic settles nothing.

People who behave at forty as they did at twenty must sometimes wonder why their charm is not working.

When a modest man praises himself, people listen.

The eros of advertising is lurid but not specific.

Theory now: concern for truth must not hobble our discussion.

For some, bottles of liquor gleam like the towers of Eldorado.

Every perversion has survived many tests of its capabilities.

Our vices are attempts to combine self-medication and enjoyment.

Self-pity makes people callous.

I answered my father's demands for sympathy with silence.

Disillusionment is not truth.

The lover as baby is a less troubling idea than the baby as lover.