Quotes About Illusion

The living bird is not its labeled bones.

Perhaps they'll say, These things are not real. They are phantasmagoria. They were made by dreams, and now that no one is dreaming them any longer they are crumbling away.

Another friend of mine used to maintain that airplanes stayed up in the air only because people believed—against reason—that they could fly: without that collective delusion sustaining them, they would instantly plummet to earth.

He needs to be listened to, he needs to be heard. He needs at least the illusion of being understood.

I'm dreaming that I am awake.

That birthday was the day I discovered that I was a fraud. Or not a fraud, like a bad magician: a fake, like a fake antique. I was a forgery, done on purpose.

None of this happens, of course. Or it does happen, but not so you would notice. It happens in another dimension of space.

Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?

Don't interfere with false gods, you'll get the gold paint all over your hands.

None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others.

Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state.

Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion.

When it came to love, wasn't believing the same as the real thing?

She had an idea, but it was the wrong idea. It was hardly even an idea, just a white idea balloon with no writing inside it.

There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier-glass, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairytale figure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A Sister, dipped in blood.

Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you've turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie.

What is believed in society, is not always the equivalent of what is true;

Fool, he tells himself. She's not here. She was never here. It was imagination and wishful thinking, nothing but that. Resign yourself. He can't resign himself.

at this distance you're a mirage, a glossy image fixed in the posture of the last time I saw you. Turn you over, there's a place for the address. Wish you were here.

An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.

A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

It was only a dream. It was only a larval poem. —

You'll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don't be deluded by any other endings, they're all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality. The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.

It would make me feel that I have power. But such a feeling would be an illusion, and too risky.