Quotes About Illusion

Nelson Knutson?" I nodded. "What kind of name is that? It sounds like something a magician would say . . . you know, like abracadabra." "It does?" "Yeah. You know, I'm waving my magic wand and . . . Nelson Knutson! . . . there's a rabbit in my hat!

Most of the monsters men fear are in their minds. They would vanish like smoke if we would only let them.

Tomorrow the mirrors will mock me

I see capital through the flurry On this Monday night twenty-first. Some do-nothing has made up the story That love exists on the earth. And from laziness or from boredom All believed, and thus they live: Wait for meeting, fear the parting, And sing songs of love. But to others opens a secret And upon them descends a still. I by accident came upon this And since then am as if I'm ill.

Even now I cannot believe that I am still alive and writing this account of the emperor's death. I put my hands to my eyes, wondering if what I am relating here is not all a dream - or maybe it is not a dream: perhaps it is a delusion and I am mad, the victim of some extraordinary and monstrous hallucination. How comes it that when he is dead I am still numbered among the living?

Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.

In our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can't eat them.

I had very good eyes once. Though it's another thing to say what I saw. In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.

Tev š? vai t? visas skaist?s lietas liekas negl?tas…

Tas bija br?niš??gi un piln?gi sadom?ti. Viss bija ne?sts. T? nebija dz?ve. T? nebija Par?ze. Bija augusts. Es nebiju t?rists. Es nebiju vecpuisis. Es meloju pats sev. Sev, vi?ai, savai ?imenei. Vi?a nebija mu??e, un, kad pien?ca pa?iru laiks, telefona zvani un meli, vi?a aizbrauca. Pie lidostas durv?m vi?a man pav?st?ja: ''Es m??in?šu dz?vot bez jums. Es ceru, man izdosies…

Friend of the Gatsbys . . .

You get so close to, and so wound up in, what you are trying to do that you can lose perspective. Your mind may trick you into seeing what you want to see, not what is really there.

So many dreams are crowding upon me now that I can scarcely tell true from false: dreams like light imprisoned in bright mineral caves; hot, heavy dreams; ice-age dreams; dreams like machines in the head.

Why was I led astray by a tiger brightness? Why did a false sun lure me so far from home?...my eyes had looked at something forbidden and seen what they should never have seen, and now sight itself had gone out of them…never again would I see the blinding glare of enemy eyes.

What I saw had no solidity, it was all made of mist and nylon, with nothing behind.

The men's tanned faces, the faces of the women, bright with cosmetics, all suddenly appeared similar, as though wearing identical masks; hard, smiling, decorative, devoid of feeling. Not one of the seemed capable of expressing affection or pity or any of the softer emotions. They frightened her, these gay, hard, animated, worldly masks; she would always be a stranger among them, lost, ill-at-ease, out of place.

I had a friend, a lover. Or did I dream it? So many dreams are crowding upon me now that I can scarcely tell true from false: dreams like light imprisoned in bright mineral caves; hot, heavy dreams; ice-age dreams; dreams like machines in the head.

Il reale e' a piu' strati, e l'intero Creato, quando si e' giunti ad analizzare fin l'ultimo strato, non risulta affatto reale, ma pura e profonda immaginazione

When a small child, I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong, happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away.

God had nothing to do with it, or only as much as He has something to do with everything. It was all just as I imagined it would be. A huge lot of hocus-pocus. For hours they put me to the acid test. Except I never imagined that they would sit there and write down all the rubbish I was spouting, and that after that I had to write my name under it, saying that I myself had really spouted all that.

had read so many paper-backs she was having trouble working out what was real life and what was fiction.

The women were thus simultaneously dressed up and stripped down. The evidence of an overmaterialized and scopically available body emerges not out of bare flesh or real ornaments, but instead from their phantasmic conflation, an overlapping of surfaces located in teasing peripheries: the borders of a collar, the peep of a hem, the gleaming edge of a sleeve.

The war ended the way a passage through a tunnel ends," wrote the Czech memoirist Heda Kovály. "From far away you could see the light ahead, a gleam that kept growing, and its brilliance seemed ever more dazzling to you huddled there in the dark the longer it took to reach it. But when at last the train burst out in the glorious sunshine, all you saw was a wasteland full of weeds and stones, and a heap of garbage."8

From far away you could see the light ahead, a gleam that kept growing, and its brilliance seemed ever more dazzling to you huddled there in the dark the longer it took to reach it. But when at last the train burst out in the glorious sunshine, all you saw was a wasteland full of weeds and stones, and a heap of garbage.