Quotes About Illusion

I have a boyfriend who's a ghost, I thought. Of course I'm living in a dreamworld.

Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. —From Long Day's Journey into Night, by Eugene O'Neill

Bert, whenever you see something bright, shining, perfect-seeming - all gold, with purple spots - look behind the paint! And if it's a lie - show it up for what it really is!

But the question I am pressing is how the "dagger" can continue to serve its purpose once we have seen through the fact that it is a shadowy illusion.

Human beings invent myth, ideology, and religion as means of denying reality and replacing death with palliative fantasies. Helplessness and death are blows to human narcissism. Human beings create illusions about themselves, lie to themselves as a means to feel secure and less vulnerable.

Human beings destroy nature, conquer other cultures, and conceive themselves kings of infinite space. And human beings also participate in religious illusions, which boost their self-esteem by providing them with a hallucinatory control over the universe, a sense of divine protectedness and importance. Death is evaded by narcissistic inflation and delusions of dominance.

Artschwager's art always involves looking closely at surfaces, questions what an object is, wants to make you forget the name of the thing you're looking at so that it might mushroom in your mind into something that triggers unexpected infinities.

Surely, your crappy art can fake out twelve stupid people. I've seen it done with one or two.

The trouble with miracles is, they don't last long.

Society has always said: Make money. Artists have said: But there's something else. Cliché City. But in Hollwood there's the Big Lie that you can have both. A lie you want to believe.

This is Hollywood's dirty little secret. It's not about making movies. Are you kidding? Forget that shit about "the Dream Factory." It's about manufacturing frustration.

Happiness, to me, was no different than Mom's paprikalaced domino bars: something that looked sweet until you took a bite, and then made you want to vomit.

There's an end to all truth now that the war's over. We've seen too much. The conjurers and cardsharpers have given away their tricks. It's the end of blackmail.

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. —Milan Kundera

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

The world isn't the place we are told to live in. It is another place entirely. We have both more choice, and less, than we are supposed to have.

I was wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. Everyday life is the province of death. It is where all dying takes place--for the extraordinary lands we imagine simply do not exist. There is only the ordinary. It is what we inhabit, and when death comes to find us it is there that he looks.

But dreams are imagined. They are a work of the imagination.

If you want to say, Lucia, there is no inside of the park benches, I won't argue with you. But, then you have to say where the pigeons come from.

We call our country home of the brave and land of the free, but it's not. We give a false portrayal of freedom. We're not free - if we were, we'd allow people their freedom.

It is a fine thing, to set your sights on crystal towers and golden thrones," Hans Peter said quietly. "But first you had better see what lurks within those towers, and what sits on those thrones.

I think that's enough spears," I said, awkward. "There will never be enough," Shardas said. "Never enough to ensure that Velika is brought safely home." A River of Molten Rock Leontes and Shardas had discussed using an illusion to disguise the rescue party as local dragons.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. —OSCAR WILDE