Quotes About Disillusion

Charles] Nodier's later view was that fantasy reconciles men to their fate. Fantasy and the taste for chimeras, he wrote, are symptoms of a time of political decay and transition, when the unpleasant realities of political life are too hard to bear. They serve a useful purpose in that they give men hope when scepticism and disillusion would otherwise drive them to despair.

Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving and hating. Have you given up this primary business as obsolete in your own writing? What fun you are missing, then. The fun of anger and disillusion, the fun of loving and being loved, of moving and being moved by this masked ball which dances us from cradle to churchyard. Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way, in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig-bladders labeled Zest and Gusto.

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn't miss an appointment, it never has.

I'm surprised and disappointed in American culture.

I'd like to go out in the front yard and shout something. 'None of this is worth it!' That's what I'd like people to hear.

The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality.

The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as affectively as by bombs.

Hope is the only good thing that disillusion respects.

In government you carry each hope; each disillusion. And in politics it's always about the next challenge.

Disillusions all come from within ... from the failure of some dear and secret hope. The world makes no promises; we only dream it does; and when we wake, we cry!

Otherwise, everything I'd ever felt about this great country was a crock of shit.

People are like, 'Do you watch movies?' I'm like, 'I don't care.' I've ceased caring. I can't watch that construct anymore.

I'm an old cynic.

If Cody's fame and popularity seem strange to us today-he was, after all, celebrated for his prowess in killing, both buffalo and Indians-it is because his virtues were nineteenth-century virtues, and we live in an age of disillusion and cynicism. Cody's death, in a way, along with the First World War, signaled the end of those nineteenth-century values.

But was anything in life, Anne asked herself wearily, like one's imagination of it? It was the old diamond disillusion of childhood repeated - the same disappointment she had felt when she had first seen the chill sparkle instead of the purple splendor she had anticipated. That's not my idea of a diamond, she had said.

He had always shuddered at the cruelty of both stories, and in so doing had lost any simple beliefs, which had not, in any case, persisted after childhood, but having thought about the matter he preferred Pandora to Eve. Pandora let loose Discord, but at the bottom of the box discovered Hope. There was thus the relief of something saved, essential to any story, although when hope outlasted expectation the outcome was disillusion. That he was beginning to understand.

Disillusion in an ache that eats into the dreams of goodness, of love, of any value that matters - even to the very belief in life.

Amory said to himself that there were essentially two sorts of people who through natural clarity or disillusion left the enclosure and sought the labyrinth.

At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.

His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

Of Amory's attempted sacrifice had been born merely the full realization of his disillusion, but of Monsignor's funeral was born the romantic elf who was to enter the labyrinth with him.

There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth--yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams...I know myself, he cried, but that is all.

Love, sleep, drugs and intoxicants are elementary forms of art, or rather, of producing the same effect as art. But love, sleep and drugs all have their disillusion.