Quotes About Illusion

Ralph found himself fantasizing every time they made love: his beloved Sharon kept getting replaced by a seventeen-year-old vixen in a darkened movie theater.

But, for many of us, renouncing the illusion of safety, and accepting the reality of our fundamental insecurity, proves to be a difficult step.

Optimism is an attempt to circumvent the truth.

People love to apply themselves to games, jobs, relationships, politics, to create the illusion of meaning...If I can just heal my shoulder, then I could be a quarterback! If only I could finish this documentary and tell the story of my great-uncle to the world; then I would matter . If I was a movie star, then I would exist . People will light a crack pipe or steal a television just to try and feel that they exist

Because our culture so highly values an illusion of self-control and control of circumstance, we become abject when contemplating mentation that seems more changeable, less restrained and less controllable, more open to outside influence, than we imagine our own to be. — Judi McGruder

Il razionalismo moderno fa come gli struzzi: mette la testa sotto terra per nascondersi, e si ritiene soddisfatto se riesce a drogare milioni e milioni di uomini con le «istruzioni per l'uso»

Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.

Psihoz? colectiv?, domnule Dudard, psihoz? colectiv?! Ca ?i religia, care-i opiumul popoarelor!

JEAN: Visezi de-a-mpicioarelea! BERENGER: Dar eu stau jos. JEAN: Jos sau în picioare-i tot aia! BERENGER: Eh. nu... totuÅŸi e-o diferen??! JEAN: Nu-i vorba de asta. BERENGER: P?i tu ai spus c?-i totuna de-i jos sau în picioare... JEAN: Nu m-ai înÅ£eles. Atunci cînd visezi e totuna dac? visezi aÅŸezat sau în picioare!... BERENGER: Ei bine, da, visez... ViaÅ£a e vis...

Experience teaches us that when one hears the doorbell ring it is because there is never anyone there.

The Dog and the Cow," an experimental fable. Once upon a time another cow asked another dog: "Why have you not swallowed your trunk?" "Pardon me," replied the dog, "it is because I thought that I was an elephant.

Is all this an image of time? Everything disintegrates before our very eyes.

Eh oui, je rêve...la vie est un rêve.

Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get you nowhere fast. That's where I've got—nowhere. Where everyone lands in the end, even if most of the suckers won't admit it.

Yes, facts don't mean a thing, do they? What you want to believe, that's the only truth!

Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?

Stay passed out, that's the right dope. There ain't any cool willow trees- except you grow your own in a bottle.

Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it? It's the three Gorgons in one. You look in their faces and turn to stone. Or it's Pan. You see him and you die - that is, inside you - and have to go on living as a ghost. - You have a poet in you but it's a damned morbid one!

Sometimes it was hard to tell whether the fog was rolling in over the city or whether the city was drifting out to meet it.

Charity belongs to nobody. Its image, a soap bubble, shines for an instant, bursts, and never knows who blew it.

Funny how people don't really see each other. Men and women. They invent each other in their minds and then they see what they invent.They don't really see each other. Now she was in love with him and she didn't even know his real name, didn't know anything real about him.

I could head east from Fifth Avenue and reliably reach Madison, turn south from 53rd and get to 52nd every single time. The scientist—or the Buddhist—might declare such perceptions were illusions, but not one of them would head uptown to get to the Bowery. They knew what they knew. They saw what they saw. So

she has been bewitched by a wicked sorceress, and will not regain her beauty until she is my wife.' 'Does she say so? Well if you believe that you may drink cold water and think it bacon'.

It seemed that all the time in the world had passed, and that none had passed at all.