Quotes About Illusion

Romantic ardor is in basic principle Lethean. Its purpose is temporarily to blind us to one another; make us forget the low esteem in which we really hold one another, and in which we quite deserve to be held; the anesthetic administered to reason without which the race would not go on.

When the weatherman spoke he did so in smooth, rolling clauses, full of long words such as schoolmasters use when they are teasing a favored pupil, but he told them very little about himself. His talk was like cotton candy, that huge sweet bauble that fills the eye but leaves little in your belly when you've eaten it.

reality isn't what it used to be.

The darkness does us a favor by exposing control as an illusion. When everything is removed, "Where can I take back some control here?" eventually ceases being the active question and is replaced with a plea: "Lord, help me let go of control. Help me die. Help me trust.

getting a second chance is the greatest human dream and delusion we have. It even outranks religion.

Give the people the illusion of democracy, with a few elected councils that've been given power over local trivia, while you control anything that really matters directly through the economy.

Our perception of the Silfen as gentle and kind is our own stupid, convenient illusion. We wanted to believe in elves. And how many human bodies lie out there under the snow because of that?

You convinced yourselves we're just a bunch of regular lads who got a bad break in life. Anything else would have cracked your dream open and made you face reality. Illusion is easy. Illusion is the loser's way out. Your way.

playing with reality, making the real unreal and vice versa, is the principal avenue for the development of mentalization.

Did I dream this belief or did I believe this dream?

a totally dried noose for one is to another an integrated text adept at the cards that ruin whimsy...

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

And I realize that maybe not so much has changed as we all thought, that maybe the whole idea of progress is a paradox, a rocking horse that goes forward and back, forward and back, but stays in the same place, giving only the comforting illusion of motion.

The true reality of things is not important. What's important is what people believe

Why? Because he believed that "living in the expectation of death . . . would . . . be . . . harder" than living with an illusion. His position may have been highly humane, but it was also debilitating.

Reality confounds image.

In a cement park across the street is this giant sculpture. It is a giant umbrella frame lying on its side. It's green. Stand under it, during a rainstorm, you'll still get wet - that's why it's art.

That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.

What I'd noticed was that here, in the windshadow of the mountain, it often smelled like rain. It might be raining up on the ridge, I might see the veils and rags of rain hanging down out of the scudding clouds, I might see shrouds of rain hauled over the country the way a fishing boat might drag a net, but—no rain here. A spatter, maybe, then nothing. Willy told me when I first moved in that it was like living in a strip bar. So close, looks so good and you never get laid.

It was not real. Jack looked around and thought that the Inferno was not credible: not because the details of Hell were beyond the pale—they were—but because of the unshakable equanimity of Virgil.

Quit trying to manage your fears, and face them. Walk right into them— and realize that your control has been an illusion all along. You need Jesus every second.

Maybe it's not just a metaphor, and maybe mystery...paradox...wonder...aren't LESS real than this world, but MORE real than this world.

We welcome into our homes the machines that vacuum the thoughts out of our heads and pump in someone else's. John Berger in Ways of Seeing said that television advertisers succeeded by persuading viewers to envy themselves as they would be if they bought the product. These programmes do something similar, by persuading the viewer to envy himself as he would be if his life were that little bit more exciting and melodramatic than it actually is. They can make things seem normal that are not.

Self-Professed Black Magicians seem universally unable to fight, fuck, or even buy their way out of wet paper bags, despite phantasizing constantly about becoming powerful psychopaths.