Quotes About Illusion

This is our tragedy....our fictions are killing us, but if we didn't have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding of actual truths. Maybe human life was truly fictional in this sense, that those who lived it didn't understand it wasn't real.

man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

Maybe, according to my insula, this is the way things are these days in America: that for some of us, the world stopped making sense. Anything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everything's slip-sliding around and there's nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams.

When they saw the host of chameleon butterflies and the way they both clothed the girl Ayesha and provided her with her only solid food, these visitors were amazed, and retreated with confounded expectations, that is to say with a hole in their pictures of the world that they could not paper over.

When ninety-nine percent of people thought the world was flat," Evel said, "it didn't make the world flat. The world didn't need people to believe it was round to be round. Right now, ninety-nine percent of people are happily having a picnic on a railway track. Which doesn't mean there isn't a train coming down the line, traveling pretty fast. The railway train doesn't need people to believe it's coming, because it's coming.

He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of green-tinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.

Maybe this is what human history was: the brief illusion of happy victories set in a long continuum of bitter, disillusioning defeats.

los paraísos artificiales acaban en infiernos naturales...

one man long as a life and thin as a lie

Civilsation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves.

Yalan iÅŸi bitince çürüyüp gidecek; Oysa gerçek büyüktür ve galip gelecek, zaferine ald?ran olsa da olmasa da.

People tend to focus on the magic more than the realism. But, like all fiction, fantasy arrives at truth via the road of untruth.

one man long as a life and thin as a lie, a second who seems to lack a spine, and a third whose lower lip juts, whose belly tends to squashiness, whose hair is thinning and greasy and worming over the tops of his ears, and between whose eyebrows is the tell-tale furrow that will, as he ages, deepen into the scar of a bitter, angry man.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same

Deprived of the income he had received from Homi Catrack, my uncle had taken his booming voice and his obsessions with hearts and reality up to the roof of his Marine Drive apartment block; he had stepped out into the evening sea-breeze, frightening the beggars so much (when he fell) that they gave up pretending to be blind and ran away yelling … in death as in life, Hanif Aziz espoused the cause of truth and put illusion to flight.

I had thought myself free of him, but that was vanity. Death shows us the power of blood.

She, whose life had blown up, emptying her of history and leaving in its place only that dark dream of majesty, that illusion so powerful that it demanded to enter the sphere of what-was-real - she, rootless Bilquis, who now longed for stability, for no-more-explosions, had discerned in Raza a boulder-like quality on which she would build her life. He was a man rooted solidly in an indeflectible sense of himself, and that made him seem invincible.

Voller Entsetzen begriffen sie, dass dies der letzte & schlimmste Trick des Dschungels war, dass er sie, indem er ihre Herzenswünsche erfüllte, dazu verleitete, ihre Träume aufzubrauchen, so dass sie, während ihr Traumleben ihnen entschlüpfte, so hohl & durchsichtig wie Glas wurden.

When people start talking about a golden age," he said, "they always think a new world has begun which will last forever. But the truth about these so-called golden ages is that they never last very long. A few years, maybe. There's always trouble ahead.

imagined world behind our eyelids can drip its magic into the world we see when we open our eyes.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

Actually I think it's the left eye that sees the truth," he added. "It sees everything distorted and deformed. Which in fact everything is. The right eye is the one that sees the fiction of normality. So I have truth and lies, one eye for each. It's good.

un país donde la verdad es lo que se le dice que sea, la realidad, de forma absolutamente literal, deja de existir, de forma que todo resulta posible salvo lo que se nos dice que es real;