Quotes About Illusion

I thought it was a person,' she said, ignoring my question. 'I thought it was a person. I thought it was.

You can't physically fear a doll only a foot and a half high.

It was a feeling I often had when out in the wilderness: that things were not quite what they seemed, and I had to fight against the sensation because it could overwhelm my scientific objectivity.

Be', dipende dai soffitti alti, no? Vedi cose che non esistono. E le cose che vedi sembrano altre cose. Un uccello può essere un pipistrello. Un pipistrello può essere una busta di plastica che vola. Così va il mondo. Vedi una cosa per un'altra. Uccelli-foglie. Pipistrelli-uccelli. Ombre fatte di luci. Rumori accidentali che sembrano più significativi. È sempre così, dovunque vai.

Funny how even then, as systems failed, flickered out, institutions revealed as paper thin, that so many couldn't bring themselves to believe in anything. That it helped if you didn't. Better to observe the rituals, use the catchphrases. Share your concern.

That placing trust in a word like border had been a mistake, a trap. A slow unraveling of terms unrecognized until too late.

Here it came. There it was. How comfort led to overreach or to some half reveal of what should be hidden.

You tell yourself this is no less or more real than bowling at Chipper's.[...] That this moment is the same as every other moment, that it makes no difference to the atoms, to the air, to the creature whose walls breathe all around you.

As I adjusted to the light, the Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to mock my ability to comprehend it. It was a figure within a series of refracted panes of glass. It was a series of layers in the shape of an archway. It was a great sluglike monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star. My eyes kept glancing off of it as if an optic nerve was not enough

Alcohol made it hard to tell a demon from a monster.

What a nothing you made out of the world you were given.

Jovial" had always been a pretext - the kind of hearty banter that covered up greater and lesser crimes.

The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?

We all live in a kind of continuous dream," I told him. "When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we've taken as reality.

I leaned in closer, like a fool, like someone who had not had months of survival training or ever studied biology. Someone tricked into thinking that words should be read.

She was reflecting back on a truth she had learned over the years: that people heard what they wanted to hear, saw what they wanted, believed what they wanted.

Everything in the past is memory and everything in the future is imagination. Those're both illusions – memories are unreliable and we just speculate about the future. The only thing that's completely real is this one instant of the present – and that's constantly changing from imagination to memory. So, see? Most of our life's illusory.

I'm not your proverbial worst nightmare because nightmares aren't real and I am more real than anybody wants to admit.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

Simplicity and subtlety make for the best con. A distraction should lead the mark's attention upward, either toward the sky or to some better vision of himself. Color signals danger. Try to appear to have as many eyes as possible.

Americans so dearly love to be fooled. —Charles Baudelaire

I thought of a line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, "As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.

Sometimes distortions can speak the truth. They confirm for me what is real by troubling me with something false.

You'll never solve your mysteries, Scharr. Not as long as we live in this. This world's a whore, all soaked in perfumes, and you're so easily seduced." He tapped his skull. "Break the eggshell. Time to fly.