Quotes About Illusion

So convinced was he that the external world was the result of a vast deception practised upon him by the gross senses, that when he stared at a great building like St. Paul's he felt it would not very much surprise him to see it suddenly quiver like a shape of jelly and then melt utterly away, while in its place stood all at once revealed the mass of colour, or the great intricate vibrations, or the splendid sound—the spiritual idea—which it represented in stone.

All his life he had realised that his senses brought to him merely a more or less interesting set of sham appearances; that space, as men measure it, was utterly misleading; that time, as the clock ticked it in a succession of minutes, was arbitrary nonsense; and, in fact, that all his sensory perceptions were but a clumsy representation of real things behind the curtain—things he was for ever trying to get at, and that sometimes he actually did get at.

Of course it was nonsense, but then it haunted him, and once an idea begins to do that it ceases to be nonsense. It has clothed itself in reality.

No matter how many times you stir up a steaming pile of crap, it's still just a steaming pile of crap.

Surely the likeness of this world is that of a snake: it is soft to touch, and deadly poisonous. The ignorant child is distracted by it, and the one with understanding and intellect is cautious of it. So turn away from what fascinates you in it, for how little of it stays with you.

How very disappointing truth is sometimes.

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn't there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.

Above the keyhole the door has a latch. It is pretending to be an authentic old latch. The door is pretending to be an authentic old door. Maybe everything there is isn't authentic any more. Maybe everything there is is a kind of pretending.

She knew it was supposed to happen like that, that although these photographs were a signal to the eyes about something really happening, the more she looked at them the less she felt or thought. The more pictures she saw, the less they meant something that had happened to real people and the more it became possible to pile real people up like that again anywhere you wanted and have your picture taken standing smiling behind them.

Do things just go away? her mother says. Do things that happened not exist, or stop existing, just because we can't see them happening in front of us? They do when they're over, George says. And what about the things we watch happening right in front of us and still can't really see? her mother says.

the room had been lost 'til then. So, if you were in a room, I mean if you were just sitting in a room, could the room you were in get lost?

The surface of things is a lie, and everybody who sees the hoarding for what they are knows it.

The surface of things is a lie, and everybody who sees the hoardings for what they are knows it.

It's as if that map they gave us is nothing to do with the actual experience of being here, she said.

Elisabeth is faintly perturbed. She realizes this is because she likes to imagine her mother knows nothing much about anything.

It was all : it was nothing : it was more than enough. Fine.

the number-one rule in making shit up: Make it so unbelievable that people have to believe it.

Archie materialized, a vision of how aging men delude themselves into believing they have achieved peak allure.

Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.

Pride is a funny thing; it can make what is truly worthless appear to be a treasure.

You can be betrayed in your sleep. The whole world can tilt while you're dreaming of butterflies.

Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

Billy didn't need someone to pour him his drinks, he needed someone to tell him that living isn't poetry. It isn't prayer. To tell him and convince him. And none of us could do it because every one of us thought that as long as Billy believed it was, as long as he kept himself believing it, then maybe it could still be true.

There was... her capacity to believe. There was as well her capacity to be deceived, since you can't have one without the other...