Quotes About Deception

I need to bring my illusions to the truth instead of giving truth to my illusions.

The ego is a master illusionist, and one of the ways it diverts your attention, from the moment you're born, is by giving you — and this calls for another drum roll, please — problems.

I crammed a handful of Ativan into his mouth and flooded that orifice with forty ounces of Coca-Cola from the cup holder. 'This is going to take effect immediately,' I lied. 'Breathe, Mr. Sakha, breathe. Would you like me to sing a calming Western song? My name is Luka', I sang. 'I live on the second floor.

The best fiction is the fiction of self-delusion. It contrasts the banality of our self-made fictions against the hopelessness of the world as it really is. The worst thing that we can tell you at a place like Princeton is that you can have it all." He scanned the small group around him and brushed the leathery buttons holding his vest tightly over his large body. "Well," he said. "You can't.

Or was this merely a riff on her unfortunate marriage? Her misfortune as part of his seduction?

when a man, continued Raoul,adopts such romantic methods to entice a young girl's affections. .. The man must be either a villain, or the girl a fool: is that it?

If I don't save her from the hands of that humbug, he said, aloud, as he went to bed, she is lost. But I shall save her. He put out his lamp and felt a need to insult Erik in the dark. Thrice over, he shouted: Humbug!...Humbug!...Humbug!

Tonight she's still wearing the gold ring, and you're not the one who gave it to her. Tonight she gave her soul again, but not to you.

My lies were as hideous as the monster that had inspired them

Humbug!...Humbug!...Humbug!...

The Persian: You know what you promised me, Erik: no more murders! Erik: Have I really committed murders, he asked, taking on an amiable expression.

Reich implied notions of collective will rather than a dichotomy of deception and undeceived desire: "We must accept the screams of Reich: no, the masses were not deceived; at a particular moment, they actually desired a fascist regime" (FD 215).

A false hope gives only false comfort.

T]here may be no more depressing place on the planet than the floor of a casino.

Time turns our lies into truths.

Dorcas belonged, as I now realize, to that vast group of women (which may, indeed, include all women) who betray us—and to that special type who betray us not for some present rival but for their own pasts.

He was a bad man, a bully and a thug, yet he was deeply religious in his way—I very much doubt that he would have made such a thing up. It was not his sort of lie, if you know what I mean.

Gold is the kindest of all hosts when it shines in the sky, but comes as an evil guest to those who receive it in the hand.

I have a bird. Inside." She patted the flat stomach below her small breasts, and for a moment Nicholas thought she had really found food. "She sits in here. She has tangled a nest in my entrails, where she sits and tears at my breath with her beak. I look healthy to you, don't I? But inside I'm hollow and rotten and turning brown, dirt and old feathers, oozing away. Her beak will break through soon.

The painting was of that irritating kind which dissolves into mere blobs of color unless it can be seen as a whole. I took a step backward to get a better perspective of it, then another … With the third step, I realized I should have made contact with the wall behind me, and that I had not. I was standing instead inside the picture that had occupied the opposite wall: a dark room of ancient leather chairs and ebony tables.

Dorcas belonged, as I now realized, to that vast group of women (which may, indeed, include all women) who betray us—and to that special type who betray us not for some present rival but for their own pasts.

The idea is that a beard makes it easy to cut a man's throat. You grab it and jerk his head up." "I see," Silk said. Mentally, he cancelled the beard he had only just resolved to grow.

She stopped spinning to smile at me. I knew she meant it to be friendly, but her teeth were terrible and looked as sharp as razors.

We call for night to hide our acts, But Night, a god, gives God the facts.