Quotes About Illusion

Truth is too dazzling to those who are spellbound by the mediocre

Some people are so fake, when they die another person's life flashes before their eyes

2 + 2 = 5: the sum of all fears

The measuring stick of success in Hollywood is covered in shit at both ends

Glittering generalities are designed to blind you from the dull Devil in the details

Leo Koretz, the Bernie Madoff of the Roaring Twenties, operated his swindle for far longer and with more panache than his contemporary, Charles Ponzi. He was a better actor, a more adept liar, a shrewder salesman. He kept his scam alive – and his investors none the wiser – for almost two decades …. In terms of the scale of their frauds, staying power and sheer audacity, Leo Koretz and Bernie Madoff stand apart in the pantheon of pyramid-building swindlers.

You have always been dazzling - the life of every party, the glamour girl who dances until dawn." "Well, I am. But I'm dancing on broken glass. I'm Miss Havisham's wedding cake, Kit. A frothy, expensive, mice-eaten confection. I'm the Sphinx's nose, the fallen Colossus. I'm a beautiful ruin, and it's time that has done the deed.

I had forgot," I said slowly, "Forgot what?" "That talking to you is like staring into a carnival looking glass. Up is down, down is up, Nothing makes sense." "Of course it does." His voice was gentle and his smile back in evidence. "Veronica, do you think I enjoy playing the villain? I loathe it. I want only to be left alone, but like any creature, I will fight if I am cornered...

loved only the illusion, the mirror face you chose to show me. I wonder which of us I pity more.

You are far too old for fairy tales, Miss Speedwell. Surely you know the life of royalty is not at all as we believe it to be. It is a prison—a gilded one—but a prison nonetheless.

If you look up "charming" in the dictionary, you'll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?

Sometimes you think you've found love, when it's really just one of those objects that are shiny in a certain light--a trophy, say, or a ring, or a diamond, even. Glass shards, maybe. You've got to be careful, you do. The shine can blind you. The edges can cut you in way you never imagined. It is up to you to allow that or not.

It's shocking the things we call love.

But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me. You've got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off.

So I put up with bad behavior in the name of loving the way I thought you were supposed to love.

Maybe we all just want to feel special, even for a little while, to be fooled for a bit into feeling something besides the truth of our own ordinariness.

It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.

A drop of poison on that gathering snow. That moment in the fairy tale when we know what just happened but the princess doesn't.

We forget that just because something is honest it is not necessary the truth.

We forget that just because something is honest it is not necessarily the truth.

Maybe it was better to be who he thought I was than who I thought I was.

True love, even if just in your head, can make you forget how badly things actually suck.

I didn't think it was such a hot idea to encourage kids to believe they led movie-star lives, even for a night.

The person you can most easily mislead is yourself.