Quotes from Mason Cooley

Trust, but look for the exits.

Mistrust makes life difficult. Trust makes it risky.

When understanding would be too difficult, I become trusting.

Self-hatred and self-love are equally self-centered.

Your love for me is founded in a sentiment. My love for you is founded in the body. A precarious interchange.

The lyric deals with love and sorrow, the aphorism with contradiction and deceit.

A frog in love would not be enchanted to learn that her beloved had turned into Prince Charming.

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

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

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

I love money, but will money ever love me in return?

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

Most reputations are not ruined but forgotten.

Reputation runs behind the current state of affairs.

Lust and greed are more gullible than innocence.

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.

Preserving tradition has become a nice hobby, like stamp collecting.

Only the broken-hearted know the truth about love.

Irony regards every simple truth as a challenge.

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

I read less and less. I have not forgiven books for their failure to tell me the truth and make me happy.

Truth can remain silent. Lies must be spoken.

I cling to depression, thinking it a form of truth.

Truth-telling frightens me. Lying confuses me.