Quotes About Illusion

Experience can't be reduced to a 4x6 inch still, her mother says. People stick their loves in cellophane prisons. They incarcerate images. Then they put these cemeteries on coffee tables. They're mockeries.

You can't know a father. They're all magicians. Got two million years of strings and mirrors in their pockets.

Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.

It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier's mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

Romances serve but to feed the imagination of the young; they add nothing to the sum of truth.

odalisque, prompting us to call him Dingolion and Dandelingo

Things are not at all what they seem to be: oh no, not at all.

Perhaps this is a dream, said Madam La Vaughn from her chair. Perhaps the whole thing has been nothing but a dream.

And he told himself, reader, that it was the cloth that he desired and not the light.

Listen, said Beverly. Let me tell you something. There is no Very Friendly Animal Center. That cat is long gone.

They lived happily ever after. It said so. In the book. They were the last words on the page. Happily ever after. Despereaux was sure that he had read exactly those words time and time again. Lying on the floor with the drum beating and the mice shouting... Despereaux had a sudden, chilling thought: Had some other mouse eaten the words that spoke the truth? Did the knight and the fair maiden really not live happily ever after?

Normalcy is an illusion, of course," said William Spiver. "There is no normal.

Magic is always impossible," said the magician. "It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it is magic.

Magic is always impossible, said the magician. It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it is magic.

She had never looked to see what lay beneath the surface, because the surface was easy enough to polish and keep bright.

But aren't all of us like a fine weaving? The pattern the world sees often hides the threads." Tess

Can we ever see the truth when desire blinds us? Or do we call it the truth because it is what we wish to see?

That is true. But nevertheless, you are like the prisoners in the cave, your legs and necks shackled by your maps and your walls so that all you can see is the shadows thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave. You think they are the truth, but they are only a shadow of the truth, which lies—" He gestured to the sky and the plain and the distant spiral curl that was the growing city of Sarai. "—out here, under the gaze of the sun and the moon and the stars.

They're hobgoblins

Everyone always believes him to be the person they think he is, which in truth is no one

From Flowering Judas ] She is, her comrades tell her, full of romantic error, for what she defines as cynicism in them is merely 'a developed sense of reality'.

We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or a toy bear's worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.

Ain't no one ever told you yet? I recon I thought you've all figured out. - What? - That all this stuff about happy-endings is lies. The only ending in this world is death.

Most of what we consider beauty is manufactured, but the fact of that manufacture does not make it unbeautiful.