Life & Wisdom Quote by Mason Cooley

Cooley slices romance into two different starting guns: the mind’s projector and the body’s alarm system. “Love begins with an image” isn’t just about physical looks; it’s about narrative. An image is editable, portable, and sticky. It can be a face across a room, but it can also be a role you cast someone in: caretaker, rebel, safe harbor, muse. Love, in this framing, launches as a kind of private artwork - you compose a person before you actually know them, then spend weeks or years trying to make reality match the first draft.

“Lust with a sensation” is colder, cleaner, and deliberately less flattering. Sensation is immediate, nonverbal, hard to moralize. It bypasses the storytelling brain and goes straight to appetite. Cooley’s wit is that he refuses the usual hierarchy where love is elevated and lust is debased; he just gives them different mechanisms. One is aesthetic and interpretive, the other tactile and involuntary.

The subtext is a warning about how easily we confuse beginnings for truths. If love starts as an image, it’s vulnerable to projection, misrecognition, and the cultural scripts we inherit about who is “for us.” If lust starts as sensation, it’s honest in its narrowness but unreliable as a compass. Cooley, an aphorist with a talent for surgical reduction, captures a modern anxiety: in an image-driven culture, love can start suspiciously like advertising - and we’re the ones doing the marketing.