Quotes About Illusion

I remember in the circus learning that the clown was the prince, the high prince. I always thought that the high prince was the lion or the magician, but the clown is the most important.

In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.

We play at believing ourselves imortal. We delude oursleves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell.

I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn't really happy.

I think of all those who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell.

Today I realized that what I wrote yesterday I really wrote today: everything from December 31 I wrote on January 1, i.e. today, and what I wrote on December 30 I wrote on the 31st, i.e. yesterday. What I write today I'm really writing tomorrow, which for me will be today and yesterday, and also, in some sense, tomorrow: an invisible day. But enough of that.

It's absurd to see an enchanted princess in every girl who walks by. What do you think you are, a troubadour?

dazzled by the shine of their own virtue, a shine that might not last (since virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its home in a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed)…

He turned his face into the stream of water and closed his eyes. I'm not as sad as I'd have thought, he told himself. This is all unreal, he said to himself.

When he went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror, he thought his features were changing. I look like a gentleman, he said to himself sometimes. I look younger. I look like someone else

The University of Santa Teresa was like a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain. It also was like an empty dance club.

Maybe "warehouses" equals "mothers", a wide margin of error is permissible when you're dealing with super-impositions.

The brief sound is like a color swallowed by a crack. But what color?

I thought you were dying, said Amalfitano. "No, I was dreaming," said Castillo.

People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth. People are cowards to the last breath. I'm telling you between you and me: the human being, broadly speaking, is the closest thing there is to a rat.

E incluso cabía una opción peor: que Cesárea hubiera torcido la realidad conscientemente.

After that moment, reality for Pelletier and Espinoza seemed to tear like paper scenery, and when it was stripped away it revealed what was behind it: a smoking landscape, as if someone, an angel, maybe, was tending hundreds of barbecue pits for a crowd of invisible beings.

A metafora az egyik módja, hogy elvesszünk a látszat világában, vagy hogy mozdulatlanul álljunk a látszat tengerében.

Los floreros disimulan La puerta del Infierno

Como somos tortuosos. Como parecemos ou nos mostramos simples diante dos outros e no fundo como somos tortuosos. Que pouquinha coisa nós somos e de que maneira tão espetacular nos contorcemos diante de nós mesmos e diante dos outros (...). E tudo isso pra quê? Para ocultar o quê? Para fazer crer o quê?

We think our brain is a marble mausoleum, when in fact it's a house made of cardboard boxes, a shack stranded between an empty field and an endless dusk.

No podía creer que fuera de noche todavía, que esa incandescencia fuera la noche. Daba lo mismo cerrar los ojos o mantenerlos abiertos.