Quotes About Disillusionment

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?

Achievement: The death of an endeavor, and the birth of disgust.

It's not that I'm not grateful for all this attention. It's just that fame and fortune ought to add up to more than fame and fortune.

You can't just pick up a gun and become a gunfighter, or go off and explore for a new world, or pull a sword out of a stone, or rescue a damsel in distress, or-- so we play games and we read books because the world isn't the world we thought we were supposed to get, the world we thought we'd been promised by somebody. Because things didn't turn out the way they were supposed to. So we go someplace else.

she had nothing now that the fantasy was gone.

So he left, and found no passion, and returned to nothing at all.

You enjoyed your honeymoon? Christ, she thought, when was someone going to ask if she'd enjoyed being fucked around the world and into outer space? Yes, sir. Thank you.

Idols always fall, Eve.

He was the one doing the Dr. Phil bullshit— Okaaaaaaaaaay

What do you want out of life? I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls. I don't know, she said. Just wait on tables and try to get along. She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad.

We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.

An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else...

Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.

America is a lonely crock of shit...

They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they though civilisation could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday and stretching out our hands in the same, same way.

As for all your latest Mayan discoveries and poems, I want to hear every word of it if you want to transmit it, or tell it when we meet, but don't expect me to get excited by anything anymore.

All over America highschool and college kids thinking 'Jack Duluoz is 26 years old and on the road all the time hitch hiking' while there I am almost 40 years old, bored and jaded

Everyone looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet; disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness, handsome, decadent, Casanova-ish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops-- a lemon lot, and how's a man going to make a living with a gang like that?

It was the bottom and dregs of America where all the heavy villains sink, where disoriented people have to go to be near a specific elsewhere they can slip into unnoticed. Contraband brooded in the heavy syrup air. Cops were red-faced and sullen and sweaty, no swagger. Waitresses were dirty and disgusted. Just beyond, you could feel the enormous presence of whole great Mexico and almost smell the billion tortillas frying and smoking in the night.

They came to be starlets; they ended up in Drive-Ins.

For years, I prayed to the gods of Cao Dai for healing and peace. But as one prayer after another went unanswered, it became clear that either they were nonexistent or they did not care to lend a hand.

What I want to say is that nobody is unbeatable. There's a kid out there who probably wants to beat me. I train hard and try to be the best that I can be, but I don't disrespect my opponents. I am not disillusioned, either.