Quotes About Disillusionment

now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth

It seemed to me as if nothing would or could ever be known. All that had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew despicable.

She sometimes thought of herself as a sort of extraterritorial patriot: given a country, she would be proud, and given a uniform, she would serve. Instead, she was given Russia, which filled her heart with despair and her mind with the idea that life was not worth living.

It was a stunning blow to learn that there was no warrant for my arrest, much less an international all-points bulletin. I had lived for years like a hunted animal, while no one at all was looking for me, not even back home. That's injustice for you.

People hate the idea of politicians, you see, but love the idea of authors, at least until they meet one.

Nothing was quite like it was supposed to be.

Perhaps it sounds like a wonderful thing to be born and raised in a small hotel in New York City. Lots of things sound fun until they are subjected to closer inspection. If you lived on a cruise ship, for example, you would have to do the Macarena every night of your life. Think about that.

Fine, he said. Anything is better than what I'm supposed to be doing.

I want you to observe...that those who cry the loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic—are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so mercilessly logical that they dare not identify it.

Many errors and tragic disillusionments are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, by itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide. And if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism—in terms of human suffering—is the belief that love is a matter of "the heart," not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy.

we do not care. We care for nothing on earth. We are tired.

You know, it's such a peculiar thing—our idea of mankind in general. We all have a sort of vague, glowing picture when we say that, something solemn, big and important. But actually all we know of it is the people we meet in our lifetime. Look at them. Do you know any you'd feel big and solemn about? There's nothing but housewives haggling at pushcarts, drooling brats who write dirty words on the sidewalks, and drunken debutantes. Or their spiritual equivalents.

And then they stopped smiling. The corpse they saw in the weeds by the roadside was a rusty cylinder with bits of glass—the remnant of a gas-station pump.

Pragmatists are sometimes more prone to illusion than dreamers; when they fall for something, they fall hard, not knowing how to protect themselves, while we dreamers are more practiced in surviving the disillusionment that follows when we wake up from our dreams.

They were actors in a rigged game, I decided, and I wanted no part of it.

But life could not be lived between the pages of a romance novel.

If I'd known what marriage was going to be like, well, heck, I probably would have tied all those hope-chest linens into a rope and hung myself from a tree!

LISTEN, don't believe in fairy tales! After that happy-ever-after wedding, they never tell you the rest of the story. Even if you get to marry the prince, you still wake up in the morning with your mouth tasting like drain cleaner and your hair all flat on one side.

naïve. The triumph of hope over experience.

When everything looks perfectly right about a person, there's usually something significantly wrong. They were probably in their early thirties, that awkward age when people still believe they matter and that life is going to go their way.

We've painstakingly climbed the "ladder of success" rung by rung—the diploma, the late nights, the promotions—only to discover as we reached the top rung that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

Though I love my country, I do not love my countrymen.