Quotes About Illusion

The idea of a thing which a man framed for himself was always more real to him than the actual thing itself.

They dissolved when I tried to inspect them, or dimmed, or slid dizzyingly away, like a ship's stern yawing down the dark lee slope of a wave.

I once spent a full three minutes looking at a bullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldn't see it even though a dozen enthusiastic campers were shouting directions. Finally I asked, What color am I looking for? and a fellow said, Green. When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what painters are up against: the thing wasn't green at all, but the color of wet hickory bark. The lover can see, and the knowledgeable.

The Bible's was an unlikely, movie-set world alongside our world. Light-shot and translucent in the pallid Sunday-school watercolors on the walls, stormy and opaque in the dense and staggering texts they read us placidly, sweet-mouthed and earnest, week after week, this world interleaved our waking world like dream. The

nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.

Frances learns something in this moment that will allow her to survive and function for the rest of her life. She finds out that one thing can look like another. That the facts of a situation don't necessarily indicate anything about the truth of a situation. In this moment, fact and truth become separated and commence to wander like twins in a fairy-tale, waiting to be reunited by that special someone who possesses the secret of telling them apart.

Doch die Erinnerung spielt uns Streiche. Erinnern iat ein anderes Wort für Erfinden, und nichts ist unzuverlässiger.

Life was clearly a cruel joke. A place with no guarantees, built on a foundation of false assumptions if not outright untruths. You think everything's going okay… Then they shoot your fucking dog.

Dreams go by opposites I was once told.

It's funny how the colours of the like real world only seem real real when you viddy them on a screen

You're a romantic," said Crabbe. "You expect too much. Reality's always dull, you know, but when we see that it's all there is, well-it miraculously ceases to be dull.

It's funny how the colours of the like real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.

It's funny how the colours of the like real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.

It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen." ? Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

It's funny how the colours of the like real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen.

Truly, he felt like "a cat biting on a urine bubble—all empty delight!

Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.

Because nothing establishes the timelessness of Time like those episodes of early experience seen, on re-examination at a later period, to have been crowded together with such unbelievable closeness in the course of a few years; yet equally giving the illusion of being so infinitely extended during the months when actually taking place.

Romantic ideas about the way life is lived are often to be found in persons themselves fairly coarse-grained.

That illusion—as such a point of view was, in due course, to appear—was closely related to another belief: that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments.

The illusion that egoists will be pleased, or flattered, by interest taken in their habits persists throughout life; whereas, in fact, persons like Widmerpool, in complete subjection to the ego, are, by the nature of that infirmity, prevented from supposing that the minds of others could possibly be occupied by any subject far distant from the egoist's own affairs.

Indeed, the illusion that anyone can escape from the marks of his vocation is an aspect of romanticism common to every profession; those occupied with the world of action claiming their true interests to lie in the pleasure of imagination or reflection, while persons principally concerned with reflective or imaginative pursuits are for ever asserting their inalienable right to participation in an active sphere.

The point is: control is often more of an illusion than a reality.

Though he knew her age to a day, — and knew her to be younger than himself, yet she was old. Something had gone of her native bloom, something had been scratched and chipped from the first fair surface, and this had been repaired by varnish and veneering.