Quotes About Illusion

I suppose she was pretty-at least everyone seemed to think so-but her mouth was small and ungenerous, and her eyes was hard. Her voice was high-pitched and always rather breathless, and she lisped slightly. The quality of her voice was childlike, innocent, and that was a deception worthy of the Serpent in Eden.

When you are in my dreams, you have a face, and I know that face to be yours, but no matter how true they are, dreams are not real, and I don't know whether my dreeming mind has ever succeeded in catching your red face.

I liked him better in the mirror. It was tempting and all too easy to imagine him happened there, furious, but unable to cause mischief.

He was big, taller than me and bulky, with dark red-brown hair queued back like a flashie, and light brown eyes that looked as clever and fake as glass.

His poetry was a bouquet of dead, rotting roses, a sickness, a canker, a stupid, self-indulgent delusion.

The first time he had seen her, the first time he had looked into her eyes, he had thought he saw his Stag of Candles reflected there. He had been trying to find that reflection again ever since, but all he ever saw was himself.

Control is an illusion. You think you're in charge and then—whoosh—life happens when you're not looking and you realize the best thing you can do is just roll with it.

The newsletter contributes to the illusion of transparency," he admits. "People are overinformed and undereducated. They have this veneer of knowledge.

times it's like living in a gorgeous museum. Even the people don't look quite real—those perfect-looking parents with perfect children in spotless navy coats. I dream of pushing them into puddles.

Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.

Doesn't it seem to you, now you are here, that anything might be real, since Millbank is?

The day had begun to feel tinny: a pretend day, a dream day, that for some unaccountable reason she had to go on and on with as if it were real.

Only when the little charade was nearly complete did Frances understand what it was all about. The spot at which Lilian had been grasping lay just above her heart. She had been drawing an imaginary stake from it.

Words, hmm? They seduce us in darkness, and the mind clothes and fashions them to fashions of its own.

I'd been right about Jack Holland. He had the kind of face that could make you believe.

We're not in Fairyland! We're in Kansas!

Rawdon knew better than anyone that Becky's promises never amounted to anything but a handful of dust.

Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse.

Fashion models and financial models are similar. They bear a similar relationship to everyday world. Like supermodels, financial models are idealized representations of the real world, they are not real, they don't quite work the way that the real world works. There is celebrity in both worlds. In the end, there is the same inevitable disappointment" - Satyajit Das, Traders, Guns & Money

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

California's like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn't turn into a price tag.

The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.