Quotes About Illusion

There's just something obvious about emptiness, even when you try to convince yourself otherwise.

So while it seemed like you were seeing everything, you really weren't. Just bits and pieces that looked like a whole.

Wake up, Caitlin, Mr. Lensing had said. But what he didn't under­stand was that this dreamland was preferable, walking through this life half-sleeping, everything at arm's length or farther away.

He wasn't what I'd thought he was; maybe he never had been. I wasn't what I'd thought I was, either.

He was looking at me, jsut as I'd thought he would be, but like Bert's, his light was not what I expected. No pity, no sadness: nothing had changed. I realized all the times I'd felt people stare at me, their faces had been pictures, abstracts. None of them were mirrors, able to reflect back the expression I thought one I wore, the feelings only I felt.

Sometimes. It was a good escape. Until, you know, it wasn"t.

There's something just obvious about emptiness, even when you try to convince yourself otherwise.

sometimes even when I know that you're lying, I still almost believe you.

There's something just obvious about emptiness, even when you try to convince yourself otherwise.

All paradises fail. —Constance Waverly

We like stories that are false and seem true (realist novels), that are true and seem false (true crime), that are false and seem false (dragons and superheroes), or that are true and seem true, but it's harder to agree on what that is.

How much of what they loved in her was real, and how much was fashioned from what they envisioned her to be?

Sebastian Boondoggle's upside-down magic allowed him to see invisible things, like radio waves and farts.

Of course I wondered if I was dreaming, but it seemed so real.

on the illusive "Monsieur Hortalez." When my friend Steven and I went looking for the building one afternoon, we came to the address at 47 rue Vieille-du-Temple and realized we had been there before.

I have to stop being young. I have to get jaded. I have to be cynical. I have to stop speaking. I have to be invisible. He likes things that don't really exist.

Love thy neighbor as thyself because you are your neighbor. It is illusion that makes you think that your neighbor is someone other than yourself.

There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep.

The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.

Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.

What art thou?' Nothing. That's the answer. Nothing. In the heart of hearts- Nothing! So of course you can't stand that and want to be Something, and you try. But instead of being this Something, the man puts it over on everybody instead.

Everyone was like the faces on a playing card, upside down either way.

But when he sat down for a moment on the bed, all the comedy of it was snatched away and torn to pieces. He was wrong about the woman's expression: he was trying to transform it into something he could bear. The truth was probably far different. He had started out to see what had happened with her eyes and had ended by substituting his own, thus contriving to put her on his side.

And truth is true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion, and not truth.