Quotes About Illusion

These days even reality has to look artificial.

We're building prisons all over the world and calling them luxury condos.

Travel is the last fantasy the 2Oth Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.

Appearances proved nothing and everything.

O sin, how you paint your face! How you flatter us poor mortals on to death! You never appear to the sinner in your true character; you make fair promises, but you never fulfil one; your tongue is smoother than oil, but the poison of asps is under your lip!

Things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem. Most things are judged by their jackets.

Happiness is a soap bubble that changes color as the iris and that breaks when touched.

In the dark recesses of a porter's lodge, beneath the tiles of an attic roof, many a poor girl dreams, on returning from the theatre, of pearls and diamonds, gold-embroidered gowns and sumptuous girdles; she fancies herself adored, applauded, courted; but little she knows of that treadmill life, in which the actress is forced to rehearsals under pain of fines, to the reading of new pieces, to the constant study of new roles.

Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it's like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn't let us go so easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you've just come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded, in the darkness

Everyone knows that hidden pull is there, but we go on living our lives, pretending we don't. We keep our gazes fixed, day after day, on the things we want to see.

Dù sao trong ?o v?ng c?a má»—i ng??i, ? má»™t nÆ¡i nào Ä'ó không th? vá»›i tá»›i, có má»™t hình dung lung linh mà ai cÅ©ng thá»±c sá»± thèm mu?n, lá»›n hÆ¡n c? ni?m hy v?ng, m?nh hÆ¡n c? ánh sáng, có tên là H?nh Phúc". (Há»' - Banana Yoshimoto)

It was all your imagination. And imagination is sometimes worse than reality.

Dev'esserci un posto dove non c'è distinzione tra vero e falso, dove le persone come ce le immaginiamo e come sono realmente vivono fianco a fianco. E' quella l'unica verità. Una verità che non sarà mai possibile esprimere a parole. "Another World

I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment.

He comes to them in disguise, tricks himself out as a bull, an eagle, a swan, or, as in the present case, a husband, and thinks to make them love him--him, that is, and not what or who he is pretending to be, as if he were a mortal just like them. Ah, yes, love, what they call love, it drives him to distraction, for it is one of that pair of things our kind may not experience, the other being, obviously, death.

When you have once seen the chaos, you must make some thing to set between yourself and that terrible sight; and so you make a mirror, thinking that in it shall be reflected the reality of the world; but then you understand that the mirror reflects only appearances, and that reality is somewhere else, off behind the mirror; and then you remember that behind the mirror there is only the chaos.

I use to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Tom Cruise too.

They were young and still starry-eyed, too naive to know that true love and happily ever after were the stuff of fairy tales—and that sometimes the line between frog and prince got pretty blurry

It's not so much what we're missing—it's what we fantasize we're missing.

the woman I knew didn't exist. You had given phony references

The worst thing about knowing that Gary Fairchild had been dead for a month was seeing him every day at work.

If I don't read page ninety, it won't have happened to them. Black Beauty will still live with all his friends at Birtwick Park … The knights will be able to go on having jolly adventures without Lancelot meeting Guinevere and bringing the whole Round Table crashing down into ruin on their heads…

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.

Prominence is cool, but when the delusion kicks in it can be a drag. Especially if you choose to surround yourself with friends and not acolytes.