Quotes About Illusion

But a man must live. Not for nothing do we invest so much of ourselves in other people's lives—or even in momentary pictures of people we do not know. It cuts both ways: the happy group inside the lighted window, the figure in long grass in the orchard seen from the train stay and support us in our dark hours. Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

Henrietta knew of the heart as an organ; she privately saw it covered in red plush and believed that it could not break, though it might tear.

They had sat round a painted, not a burning, fire, at which you tried in vain to warm your hands.....

As he turned around, he discovered Miss Tempest, her back to him, caught in a tangle of rose canes. A rose trapped by thorns. If the front of Miss Tempest was enticing, her backside was even more so. It showed a decidedly feminine figure, with curves and soft angles that could tease a man into believing the lady was just as pliable. And any man who thought that, Pierson reminded himself, would be a fool.

His life in general had been a neatly wrapped package of lies.

There was the dream of happiness and then there was what was real.

Freddie felt strongly that a natural appearance was only permissible, only really effective, it if was artificially produced.

dreams are shadows cast by truth shining on our darkest secrets

It seems to me that really crazy people don't think they're crazy. Why would you?

How things appear is only the thin, papery outer skin of the onion. Of course, when you cut open the onion, your eyes will sting and water, and then you can't see at all. You're lucky if you don't slice your finger.

People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people's minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues.

In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.

Collaborating in the very private way of love or the highest kind of friendship… is the way for gifted, energetic wives of writers to a sort of composition of their own, this peculiar illusion of collaboration.

You think you know now, don't you? But you have no idea what it was like.

I arrive home with pink flushed cheeks and glittering green-blue eyes. The hardest part is the his smell that lingers on my skin. He is here and yet he isn't here at all. It is only a trick of the mind; a terrible delusion that leaves me with pale, white arms grasping out into the shallow blunt, blackness for someone who is far away. Someone who leaves you feeling utterly and beautifully broken.

When one peels back an onion, all they have done is reveal a smaller onion.

Ich weiß es nicht genau. Umwerfend - aber auch etwas unwirklich. Als wäre ich gleichzeitig zwei Personen: Eine, der es passiert, und eine, der es unmöglich passieren kann.

Isn't that odd?' she continued as they wandered back from the front towards the shops again, 'When you see people in the shops choosing their clothes and shoes and stuff, they take ages - as though each thing they choose will be amazing and perfect. And then, look at them. They mostly look simply terrible - or just ordinary They might just as well have chosen their clothes out of a bran tub.

Ich habe festgestellt, dass es gefährlich ist, sich an Dinge zu gewöhnen.' 'Gilt das für alles?' 'Ja, für alles. Man nimmt, was immer es ist, einfach nicht mehr wahr, und, schlimmer noch, man hat die Illusion, etwas geschafft zu haben.

How could the people around me not see that I'd been spending my day in nineteenth-century Kansas, or in the pit of a giant peach? It was like I was the only one living in the real world, and they were skating blindly over an opaque surface above me.

That until now she was a Christmas tree that had been decorated by someone who hated Christmas.

My family stood right in front of me, talking and smiling. I felt like I was viewing one of those cheesy ad shots for camera companies. The ones I looked at and thought, fake, because no one's family ever looked that happy. Yet, the perfect family moment bloomed right before my eyes, and I wasn't a part of it.

It's like I'm living inside a mirror. I see things, I do things, but they are just surfaces and nothing more.

How could someone like me survive a plane crash? I didn't look like someone who could do that. I wasn't someone who could do that Maybe I hadn't Maybe I was dead. Maybe I was l was lying on the ground somewhere, rain falling over me, into my open eyes. I looked at myself in the mirror and didn't see anything. I didn't see me.