Mason Cooley

Flattery and insults raise the same question: What do you want?

— Mason Cooley

Death is just around the corner. If only it would stay there.

— Mason Cooley

Young girls giggle with nervous delight at the erections they inspire.

— Mason Cooley

A modest demeanor arouses thoughts of seduction.

— Mason Cooley

Unlike life, when books become meaningless, they are making a point.

— Mason Cooley

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

— Mason Cooley

The man in the street is always a stranger.

— Mason Cooley

Telescopes and binoculars endanger the ever-distant sublime.

— Mason Cooley

Moralists love to discourse on the hollowness of success; about the hollowness of failure they are silent.

— Mason Cooley

Living alone is good for privacy, bad for full-scale cooking and moving heavy furniture.

— Mason Cooley

Children consider disliking their parents natural, but if the dislike is returned, they are outraged.

— Mason Cooley

The family is on its way out; couples go next; then no more keeping cats or parrots.

— Mason Cooley

Posterity--the forlorn child of nineteenth century optimism--grows ever harder to conceive.

— Mason Cooley

Secrets die when kept or revealed. They live by being faintly and uncertainly repeated.

— Mason Cooley

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

— Mason Cooley

Retirement requires the invention of a new hedonism, not a return to the hedonism of youth

— Mason Cooley

Opportunity knocks, but doesn't always answer to its name.

— Mason Cooley

Sex is not imaginary, but it is not quite real either.

— Mason Cooley

Many who take up burdens come to resent being put upon.

— Mason Cooley

An old man drinks tea and reads the newspaper--forgetting age for a moment.

— Mason Cooley

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

— Mason Cooley

Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

— Mason Cooley

The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.

— Mason Cooley

Many attempt to harvest what was never planted.

— Mason Cooley

“Reading gives us a place to go when we have no where to go”

— Mason Cooley

Most people see no reason to stop arguing just because an issue has been decided.

— Mason Cooley

Hope, and hopelessness, persist despite the facts.

— Mason Cooley

Don't milk the cow too hard. She will kick you.

— Mason Cooley

Why not - is a slogan for an interesting life.

— Mason Cooley

Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.

— Mason Cooley

Ideologies can survive hostility, but not indifference.

— Mason Cooley

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

— Mason Cooley

Sorrow also fulfills Desire. Example: the Soaps.

— Mason Cooley

The perfect pleasure: money is neither fattening nor immoral nor illegal.

— Mason Cooley

Don Juan tries not to see the skeptical winks that greet his boasting.

— Mason Cooley

Amateurs believe their enthusiasm will suffice.

— Mason Cooley

No one could be the way I remember my father

— Mason Cooley

Innocence: I am only stepping on your face because it lies in my path.

— Mason Cooley

The vices of youth now exceed my powers, but not my fancy.

— Mason Cooley

Originality is in the eye of the beholder.

— Mason Cooley