Quotes About Illusion

But she was a baneful person who spoiled my good days and rejoiced in my bad and who would never allow herself to extol or admire me or to view me as others did in the mythic dimensions of a hero king, or as a huge, monumental figure immortalized on a great pedestal of white marble. And that's another thing...

hands I could deny there were crab apples in my cheeks. Every time someone asked me why I was walking around with crab apples in my cheeks, I'd just open my hands and show them it was rubber balls I was walking around with, not crab apples, and that they were in my hands, not my cheeks. It was a good story. But I never knew if it got across or not, since it's pretty tough to make people understand you when you're talking to them with two crab apples in your cheeks.

Chocolate-covered cotton.

Whether the object of your faith be real or false, you will nevertheless obtain the same effects.

I've always thought that one of the signs of true adulthood is when you realize that you spend each Christmas trying to relive childhood memories that never really happened in the first place.

Who does she think she's kidding? As if I don't know why she's sucking up to me— Because I've got something she'd like to get her hands on. At least, she thinks I've got him.

I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.

The first lesson a watcher learns is to separate truth from illusion. Because in the world of magicks, it's the hardest thing to do.

The Poem I Just Wrote The poem I just wrote is not real. And neither is the black horse who is grazing on my belly. And neither are the ghosts of old lovers who smile at me from the jukebox.

Memories are strange things. Without being something I can hold in my hand, they wield a beguiling power over me. Like a mirage in the noontime heat of summer they dance before my inner eyes and beckon me to find water where there is no water.

It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.

there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.

But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

Know what 'celebrity' is kid? Being paid to bullshit the rest of your natural life.

Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest.

We see the shadows of things, not the things themselves . . . We are forced to imagine what the writer doesn't reveal.

Civilization is faces, appearances: when these collapse, civilization collapses as well.

All that crap was like living your life with your face pressed up close against a mirror, you couldn't see your own face let alone anything surrounding it.

I don't need to shut my eyes to go blind... When your blind time passes strangely Floating and dreamy in a way speeded up like the Time Traveler apon his machine.

It had well be a dream, no one would believe me anyway.

If some men supposed themselves free it was only because they did not understand that they were imprisoned—bars could be made of any shadowy substance, any dreamy loss of light.