Quotes About Illusion

who had taken a violent fancy to me, mistaking me for something vastly better than I was.

In my opinion, consensual reality is better than facts. (Sukey Waller)

This is a photograph of me as I wish I looked all the time. Then I might have a chance of getting in Hollywood.

Dussel promised her the moon, but, as usual, we haven't seen so much as a beam.

Dussel promised her the moon, but, as usual, we haven't seen so much as a beam.

Anyone can put on a fine coat of varnish outside.

Besides, your imagination often plays tricks on you in moments of danger.

If you are mesmerized by televised stupidity, and don't get to hear or read stories about your world, you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn't miraculous--and it is.

Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar.

Nothing worked consistently anymore, not the illusion or the self-made glue that had held them together, not even the armature of habit. For years, when she

So often lately he'd come to realize that things were not as they seemed. There were hidden facets to everything. You'd think you had what you wanted in your grasp and, when you looked closely, it wasn't what it had seemed to be from a distance.

Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience.

You could make beautiful pictures with paint, but there was nothing behind it.

Once I used to imagine that those in power were different, but most of them aren't," she went on. "No one likes to admit that their own people can be as greedy and cruel as any foreigners. We perform all kinds of contortions of the mind to make a reason why it isn't really the way it looks, but we only fool the people who want to be fooled.

Yes, I was surprised about her myself. I had always considered her to be proper enough, if somewhat light-headed. It shows how one can be deceived." "Because she was killed?" Caroline said with a lift of amazement in her voice. "Precisely.

Too many illusions were being shattered for Catherine these last few days. While the court was grand, it was also terrifying, and the illustrious figures of court were merely men and women in positions of extraordinary power. Power that could be taken away at any moment.

The fact that I loved you was the greatest lie I have ever lived.

But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her dreams

When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie.

In his refusal to believe in anything supernatural or inherently evil, he was as unrealistic as an old voodoo queen who sees spirits everywhere.

You'll sing a song of victory eternally, though there is none to be had.

So that's how we go on acting dramas in our theater of the mind even when we don't believe anymore in the audience or the director or the play.

I guess we don't know what's real or unreal,' she had said without meaning to. 'You stare at anything long enough and suddenly it looks monstrous.

You stare at anything long enough and suddenly it looks monstrous." She had in fact turned away from him to stare at the bowl of flowers in the middle of the table. Old tea roses, falling to pieces amid the baby's breath and fern and purple zinnias. And they did look absolutely alien, these things, the way that insects always do, and sort of horrible! What were these things, really?