Quotes By Mason Cooley

In love, we worry more about the meaning of silences than the meaning of words.

Irony regards every simple truth as a challenge.

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

The educated do not share a common body of information, but a common state of mind.

Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness, but enables us to move back from it a little.

Magic trick: to make people disappear, ask them to fulfill their promises.

No chaos, no creation. Evidence: the kitchen at mealtime.

When I prayed for success, I forgot to ask for sound sleep and good digestion.

Romantics consider common sense vulgar.

Reality is the name we give to our disappointments.

Old and young disbelieve one another's truths.

My thought has been shaped by books; my desires by pictures.

A happy arrangement: many people prefer cats to other people, and many cats prefer people to other cats.

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

Never ask a bore a question.

If modesty disappeared, so would exhibitionism.

Living alone makes it harder to find someone to blame.

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

Hypocrisy is the outside of cynicism.

If you are going to break a Law of Art, make the crime interesting.

Listening to people keeps them entertained.

Sincerity: willingness to spend one's own money.

Expensive advertising courts us with hints and images. The ordinary kind merely says, Buy.

Hatred observes with more care than love does.

An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another.

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners.

Cynicism is full of naive disappointments.

While there's life, there's fear.

Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run.

I'm being treated like a sex object, cried the lady. No matter. I will take care of it, said Time soothingly.