Quotes from Mason Cooley

Everyone fears and courts his own demon.

Diplomats lie with a heavy sense of destiny.

To confer dignity, forgive. To express contempt, forget.

Dignity takes alarm at the unexpected sound of laughter.

No dignity without distance.

I may forget my dignity, but you may not.

I have learned to keep to myself how exceptional I am.

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

The educated can listen impassively to almost anything.

Giving out crowns to everyone will not make a nation of kings.

Every seeming equality conceals a hierarchy.

Inequality is a fact. Equality is a value.

Experience teaches us, but we scarcely know what.

The ninety percent of human experience that does not fit into established narrative patterns falls into oblivion.

Experience is a great spoiler of pleasures.

Forgiveness is like faith. You have to keep reviving it.

Ultimately, blind faith is the only kind.

Faith of the bore: everything is worth saying.

Both faith and cynicism make judgment too easy.

We worship the aesthetic, but we do not have faith in it.

Faith prefers the absurd to the plausible.

Rage is exciting, but leaves me confused and exhausted.

Fantasy mirrors desire. Imagination reshapes it.

In a strange city, I connect through food and fantasy.