Quotes About Illusion

Ultimately, though, what was painfully lacking in childhood cannot be made good by repression and the fulfillment of substitute gratifications. Even when the acquisition of power fuels the illusion, allowing it to swell to staggering proportions, the number of victims will always be too small to sate the deadly, unconscious rage of the child that was prevented from living.

the world is tumbling with innocent-seeming objects ready to declare themselves, slippery and obliging.

Her hair had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and color, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft -- a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her.

They had something close in front of them, a picture in front of their eyes that came between them and the world, which was the thing most adults seemed to have.

She would have said that love was hocus-pocus, a deception, and she believed that. But at the prospect she still felt a hush, a flutter along the nerves, a bowing down of sense, a flagrant postration

The preference most of them had for seeing through their camera, rather than looking at the real thing, and so on.

She doesn't mistake that for reality, and neither does she mistake anything else for reality, and this is how she knows that she is sane. Meneseteung

But once in a while came a moment where everything seemed to have something to say to you. The rocking bushes, the bleaching light. All in a flash, in a rush, when you couldn't concentrate (...) so you get the wrong idea, surely the wrong idea. That somebody dead might be alive and in Jakarta.

I could see a nostril, an ear, plugged up with greenish mud. . . . I don't think I really saw all this. . . . I must have heard someone talking about that and imagined that I saw it.

caramel Camelot.

Had my brother really seen me somehow, or was he merely a boy telling beautiful lies?

Things happen, I thought, and we respond. That's what it all comes down to. To believe anything else, as far as I could tell, was simply an illusion.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

Happiness was just a trick in your case.

That politicians who smiled at us and kissed our babies blue eyes shining with triumph well knew we were falling into our graves kicked by them as they counted our votes.

Gatsby's self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is many ways identical to my father's. Like Gatsby, my father fueled this transformation with the colossal vitality of his illusion. Unlike Gatsby he did this on a school teacher's salary.

The only thing to transcend is the idea that there's something to transcend. Nirvana is samsara. I finally got the memo.

It is not often that the real world conjures worse than what we can imagine.

We are all more–and less–than what we seem.

It is an illusion that once upon a time managers could make their direct reports do whatever was needed. Nobody has ever had enough authority—they never have and never will. Organizational life is too complicated for that.

The effect of the brainwashing is that we tend to think like the man who, having fallen off a 100-story building is heard to say as he passes the fiftieth floor, 'So far, so good!

the only pleasure or crutch that smokers receive when they light up, is trying to get back to the level of peace and tranquillity that non-smokers experience the whole of their lives, and that since each cigarette, far from relieving the withdrawal pangs from nicotine, is actually causing them, even that pleasure or crutch is illusory.

The desire to drink comes from the Big Monster—the illusion that drinking gives us pleasure or support. • The edgy feeling we get when we're without a drink is merely the Little Monster wanting to be fed. • The Little Monster was created by drinking in the first place. • Therefore drinking does not relieve the anxiety, it causes it.

The only pleasure or crutch smokers receive when they light up is the perceived relief of the empty, insecure feeling of the body withdrawing from nicotine that nonsmokers don't suffer from anyway. 2. Each cigarette, far from relieving the empty feeling, actually causes it, so the perception of a pleasure or crutch is an illusion. It's like putting on tight shoes to get the pleasure or relief of removing them.