Quotes About Illusion

The promise was void, like so many other sweet, illusory promises of our childhood; void as promises made in Eden before the seasons were divided, and when the starry blossoms grew side by side with the ripening peach,—impossible to be fulfilled when the golden gates had been passed.

Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.

What we call the 'just possible' is sometimes true and the thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false.

Mrs. Tulliver had lived thirteen years with her husband, yet she retained in all the freshness of her early married life a facility of saying things which drove him in the opposite direction to the one she desired. Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom in this way, as a patriarchal gold-fish apparently retains to the last its youthful illusion that it can swim in a straight line beyond the encircling glass.

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.

She felt that she was beginning to know the pang of disappointed love, and that no other man could be the occasion of such delightful aerial building as she had been enjoying for the last six months.

Fred fancied that he saw to the bottom of his uncle Featherstone's soul, though in reality half what he saw there was no more than the reflex of his own inclinations. The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

Mrs. Davilow have willingly let fall a hint of the aerial castle-building which she had

Rosamond being one of those women who live much in the idea that each man they meet would have preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless.

You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus.

Shallow natures dream of an easy sway over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly in their own petty magic to turn the deepest streams, and confidant, by pretty gestures and remarks, of making the thing that is not there as though it were.

I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.

He did not confess to himself, still less could he have breathed to another, his surprise that though he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl he had not won delight, which he had also regarded as an object to be found by search.

The chief difference between the reality and the vision was that in his dream Hetty was continually coming before him in bodily presence — strangely mingling herself as an actor in scenes with which she had nothing to do.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand

I don't really care what people tell children - when you believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, one more fib won't hurt. But I am infuriated by the growing notion, posited in some touchy-feely quarters, that all women are, or can be, beautiful.

Most 'reality' shows aren't reality at all. They're game shows with no prize. Like 'Rock of Love.' His aren't genuine feelings. Then again, Bob Barker didn't really care whether or not you won the toaster. Sorry to shatter everyone's dreams.

I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?

I sometimes wonder if two thirds of the globe is covered in red carpet.

I've had a lot of glamour come my way in the last 10 years - you know, movie stars and mansions and red carpets and trips to Europe and crazy stuff I never would have imagined - and I look at them as if I'm the bartender in the corner of the room. They've never gone into my psyche. I look at them with distance, and wonder.

Magic's an art where you use slight of hand or illusion to create wonder. And I was just intrigued with that idea.

It's odd, because I used to see pictures, on telly or wherever, of what I now know to be Shaftesbury Avenue and I used to wonder what that amazing street with all the lights was. Well, now I know. I think when you get a wee taste of something, it maybe isn't what you thought it was.

Well, I also love magic, which is, you know, different than showmanship. Magic's an art where you use slight of hand or illusion to create wonder.

I like the idea of movies having a magic element. How many times have you seen an actor in a movie who you know only as the character? It's wonderful, isn't it?