Quotes About Illusion

Marisha Pessl

many believers naively assume that real Christianity is alive and well and respected by the majority of our people. Brace yourself. It's an illusion.

Delusion is the mind's tendency to seek premature closure about something. It is the quality of mind that imposes a definition on things and then mistakes the definition for the actual experience.

More than the relaxation it evoked, this feeling in the dining hall hinted at who I might be if I wasn't who I thought I was.

Busy work often looks more like work than real work does

And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert, except that you can't see the desert because it is not a thing.

You look around and it occurs to you that this isn't real, this is only a memory, that you could let go and topple into that great windy nothing and it wouldn't matter. What frightens you is that for a couple of seconds you can't remember where the present is and how to get back there.

And this means that time is a mystery,not even a thing,and no one has ever solved the puzzle of what time is,exactly. And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert,except that you can't see the desert because it's not a thing

He no longer believes in the gods. He has heard too many contradictory stories on his travels. Better, surely, that everyone is deluded than that revelation has been so parsimoniously handed out. If he has a religion it is that of grass and rivers, of mountains and of skies that continue beyond the ends even of our longest journeys.

Y cuando miramos las cosas pensamos que estamos simplemente mirándolas desde nuestros ojos como si mirásemos a través de pequeñas ventanas y que hay una persona dentro de nuestra cabeza, pero no es así. Estamos mirando una pantalla dentro de nuestra cabeza, como la pantalla de un ordenador.

And when we look at things we think we're just looking out of our eyes like we're looking out of little windows and there's a person inside our head, but we're not. We're looking at a screen inside our heads, like a computer screen.

What is apparent is not always what is true.

The rich died, too, disappointing all those who thought that somehow they didn't. Peter Lakes had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love. The wealthy could not buy these things. On the contrary they were for the taking.

lies and truth are very close, and that something beautiful rests between.

You're crazy, Ludovico announced. Alessandro held his finger in the air. Ah! he said, but at least I'm able to tell you my last name, and at least, when they take me out to the stake my dreams may be just beginning, whereas yours, by your own definition, must and will come to a dark end. You fool yourself. Your illusions will fall away even before the end. They won't do you any good. You'll see.

the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.

If we all shift to the simulacrum, then the simulacrum, for all practical purposes, becomes the real.

It's like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real.

What is most healing about bearing witness to things exactly as they are, including my own part in my pain, is that when the voice of the pain fits the pain, there is no room for distortion or illusion. In this way, truth becomes a clean bandage that heals, keeping dirt out of the wound. To voice things as they are is the nearest medicine.

I laugh when I think of how many hours I have spent in my life weaving storylines that never came true until, like weeds, they covered my heart.

There is no fiction. There's only truth disguised as fiction

As does a magician, a writer creates a world, immerses the reader in it, & makes the reader believe it's reality.

I feel that one of the most important lessons that can be learned is that what we see may be different than what is actually in front of us.

Appearance is never not, at some level, artifice.