Mason Cooley Quotes

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

I have tried being surreal, but my frogs hop right back into their realistic ponds.

If everything had a label, we would live in a fully delineated but false world.

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

We often disguise our reflexes as deliberate actions.

It is hard to tell truth, and hard not to.

Our civilization is shifting from science and technology to rhetoric and litigation.

Friends are sometimes boring, but enemies never.

Many pains are imaginary, but all joys are real.

Sacred or not, sacrifice is an ugly business.

Even in writing an annual report, the unconscious plays a role.

To avoid doing anything, wait for the right circumstances.

The mind scolds the heart, which makes excuses and goes its own way.

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

Infallibility and invincible ignorance are the same thing.

Avid readers are enchanted by meaning, which is available chiefly in books.

Illusions are hazardous, and so are disillusions.

Alcohol postpones anxiety, then multiplies it.

Perversity depends on reversal and substitution.

Everyone fears and courts his own demon.

The eye deals with excess more easily than the stomach does.

Readers transform a library from a mausoleum into many theaters.

Your need to talk does not create in me a need to listen.

Once discover comfort, and there is no turning back.

Prudence does not save us, but shows us pictures of our destroyers.

The limits of prudence: one cannot jump out of a burning building gradually.

Moderation shifts when extremes do.

Imprudence relies on luck, prudence on method. That gives prudence less edge than it expects.

Worrying is as futile as boredom, but harder work.

Worry is not thought; complaining is not action.

There is a line between a definite maybe and an indefinite yes.

Disobedient parents are a great trouble to their children.

King Kong, Count Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera are just looking for love, like the rest of us.

Respectability is joining chastity in the museum of dead issues.

Pedagogical romances leave the mentor disgruntled, the pupil confused.

Self-pity dries up our sympathy for others.

Enough is ever-receding.

Political correctness is driving machismo underground and recalling effeminacy from exile.

Talk shows are proof that conversation is dead.

Once wealth and beauty are gone, there is always rural life.

Stupidity is a fact of life, but unmentionable. The new Prudery.

Envy grieves. Jealousy rages.

My mind no longer has romantic abysses, but has become shallow, with many little gaps and cracks.

A free spirit must be able to surmount anxiety time after time.

Every parent can imagine the joys of child abuse.

Babies and the old are permitted self-absorption. In between, it provokes resentment.

Self-congratulation pleases only the speaker.

Dignity takes alarm at the unexpected sound of laughter.

I am open-minded on all questions I care nothing about.

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