Quotes About Illusion

Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, I wish, I wish he'd go away . . . William Hughes Mearns, "Antigonish

even if she saw a ghost, she still wouldn't believe it.

who wore her makeup so thick that you could have carved your initials into her face without drawing blood.

What would ever become of Tilly-Valley's religion in that world, with headlights flashing along cemented highways, and all existence dominated by electricity? What would become of old women reading by candlelight? What would become of his own life-illusion, his secret 'mythology,' in such a world?

The world is not made of bread and honey…nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.

Instead of pausing in our multifarious activities, instead of putting aside our laborious quests, we are being perpetually fooled into thinking that happiness is to be reached in the same way as pleasure is, by the possession of something.

Seen from inside the bar, the avenue, the stores opposite, the street glimpsed going off at right angles, the trapezoid of sky visible above the lower buildings, are altered by the tinted windows into an elsewhere, oddly peaceful, a desert or the interior of the sea. Sometimes when he has fallen asleep face upward in the sun, his dreams have taken on this quality of supernatural bright darkness. ("Novelty")

And yet, though we wake, though there is no end to waking and saying Oh I see, not ever [...], still within the dream in which we find ourselves every other dream is nested, every one we have awakened from.

Nosotros decimos que para consolarnos por la pérdida del Paraíso Dios nos concedió sólo a nosotros entre todas sus criaturas Esperanza y Memoria. Mejor dijéramos: Sólo porque somos criaturas cargadas con Esperanza y Memoria alentamos la ilusión de un Paraíso que nosotros y solamente nosotros hemos perdido.

Inside it seemed much larger than it was, or was smaller than it looked, he couldn't tell which.

they slipped one by one again into the merely fictional – Hermes's false Egypt, and Bruno's false Hermes; Kraft's false Bruno; Pierce's false history of the world, the doors that had once blown open blowing closed again one by one down the corridor into the colored centuries.

That was what did the harm, knowing the one, believeing the other.

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

Beauty's but skin deep.

The poor fool hadn't realized that if all mankind shares a folly or an illusion, and likes to share it even knowing what it is, then the illusion is much more valuable and fine a kind of thing than the ass who wants to upset it.

As a general rule, these sleight-of-hand tricks are a dead give-away to the murderer once you've tumbled to the means of workin' the illusion. A special sort of crime indicates a special set of circumstances, and those circumstances narrow down to fit one person like a hangman's cap when you know what they are.

If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

GO AND CATCH A FALLING STAR.

People crave certainty. And control. We spend our lives erecting coping mechanisms, little games we play to preserve the illusion of safety.

Honor is but an empty bubble.

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat;Yet, fool'd with hope, men favor the deceit;Trust on, and think tomorrow will repay.Tomorrow's falser than the former day.

With ravish'd earsThe monarch hears;Assumes the god,Affects to nod,And seems to shake the spheres.

You see through love, and that deludes your sight, As what is straight seems crooked through the water.

When I consider Life, 'tis all a cheat; Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit; Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay: To-morrow's falser than the former day; Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blest With some new joys, cuts off what we possesst.