Quotes About Illusion

Miles watched the evening shadows flowing up along the backbone of the Dendarii range, high and massive in the distance. How small those mountains looked from space! Little wrinkles on the skin of a globe he could cover with his hand, all their crushing mass made invisible. Which was illusory, distance or nearness? Distance, Miles decided. Distance was a damned lie. Had his father known this? Miles suspected so.

they would make her own short body look like a dwarf dragging a curtain.

His fingers slid gently along her ribs. It was only in her imagination that they left a trail of rainbow light.

And as for absolute power, you sir, know what a false chimera that notion is. A shaky illusion, based on—God knows what. Magic. Sleight of hand. Believing your own propaganda.

He held out a hand in the dimness. This is an illusion. I am simply going mad with unrequited lust. Except that it hadn't seemed as unrequited as all that, now, had it? A perfectly demented grin stretched his mouth, briefly.

If the gods saw people's souls but not their bodies, in mirror to the way people saw bodies but not souls, it might explain why the gods were so careless of such things as appearance, or other bodily functions. Such as pain? Was pain an illusion, from the gods' point of view? Perhaps heaven was not a place, but merely an angle of view, a vantage, a perspective.

It may be true that every enlightened sage is insane, but it does not necessarily follow that every insane person is an enlightened sage!

The lonely fancy that had not fact to feed on, nor the fancy of any other for fellowship, was for its loneliness mad.

Fame as she walked at evening in a city saw the painted face of Notoriety flaunting beneath a gas-lamp, and many kneeled unto her in the dirt of the road. Who are you? Fame said to her. I am Fame, said Notoriety. Then Fame stole softly away so that no one knew she had gone. And Notoriety presently went forth and all her worshippers rose and followed after, and she led them, as was most meet, to her native Pit.

Ilka's triangle of pizza behaved like Dali's watch and kept folding away from her mouth.

Though men in the mass forget the origins of their need, they still bring wolfhounds into city apartments, where dog and man both sit brooding in wistful discomfort. The magic that gleams an instant between Argos and Odysseus is both the recognition of diversity and the need for affection across the illusions of form. It is nature's cry to homeless, far-wandering, insatiable man: Do not forget your brethren, nor the green wood from which you sprang. To do so is to invite disaster.

We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight — the light of our particular day.

Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.

Beauty could not love you back. People were not what they seemed and certainly not what they said. Madness was contagious. Memory served melancholy. The medieval was not so bad. Gravity was a form of nostalgia. There could be virtue in satirizing virtue. Dwight Eisenhower and Werner von Braun had the exact same mouths. No one loved a loser until he completely lost. The capital of Burma was Rangoon.

The catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that the same man would have had to wear sunglasses.

They looked like frogs who'd been kissed and kissed roughly, yet stayed frogs.

You can wake from one dream only to find yourself plunged into yet another, like some endless rosary of the mind. When that happens, it is hard to glimpse what is not dream; the waking, undreamed world flies by you, in rushing flashes of light and air, in loud, quick, dangerous spaces like those between the cars of a train. There is nothing you can do. You walk in the sleep of yourself and wait. You wait for the train to pass.

When I go back to the places of the past, nothing is there anymore, as if I have made the whole thing up. It is as if life were just a dream placed in the window to cool, like a pie, then stolen.

The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.

Irrigation sprinklers like the skeletons of brontosauruses. -Tassie Keltjin

Are you anywhere near Champaign-Urbana? No. I went there once. I thought from its name that it would be a different kind of place. I kept saying to myself, 'Champagne, urbah na, champagne, urbah na! Champagne! Urbana' He sighed. It was just this thing in the middle of a field.

All of life seems to me a strange dream about losing things you never had to begin with. About trying to find your glasses when you can't see because you don't have your glasses on.

At all the funerals for love, love had its neat trick of making you mourn it so much, it reappeared. Popped right up from the casket. Or, if it didn't reappear itself, it sent a relative of startling resemblance, a thin and charming twin, which you took home with you to fatten and cradle, nuzzle and scold.

Nothing is as good as it seems, and nothing is as bad as it seems. Somewhere in between lies realty.