Quotes About Illusion

The difference between nonfiction and fiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

The poetry was all in the anticipation - there is none in the reality.

I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.

It had not occurred to anybody in the crowd—that simple trick of inquiring about somebody who wasn't ten thousand miles away.  The magician was hit hard; it was an emergency that had never happened in his experience before, and it corked him; he didn't know how to meet it.

Maturity...is fatal to so many enchantments.

The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened." Mark Twain

I know now that all that glitters is not gold... However, I still go underrating men of gold, and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.

Like many other simple-hearted souls, it was her pet vanity to believe she was endowed with a talent for dark and mysterious diplomacy, and she loved to contemplate her most transparent devices as marvels of low cunning. Said

We were perfectly willing to go in there and rest, but it could not be done. It was only another delusion—a painting by some ingenious artist with little charity in his heart for tired folk.

everything in a dream is more deep and strong and real than is ever its pale imitation in the unreal life which is ours when we go awake and clothed with our artificial selves in this vague and dull-tinted artificial world.

Truly, seeing is believing - and many a man lives a long life through, thinking he believes certain universally received and well established things, and yet never suspects that if he were confronted by those things once, he would discover that he did not really believe them before, but only thought he believed them.

It is easier to fool the people, than to convince them they have been fooled.

Of course, there are many rich men in the empire, but their money is buried, and they dress in rags and counterfeit poverty.

Moralizing, I observed, then, that all that glitters is not gold.

So I think it is a reptile, though it may be architecture.

But the celebrate was an astonishing disappointment to me. If he had been behind a screen I should have supposed they were performing a surgical operation on him.

How fairylike does everything appear to her enchanted vision!

You will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me...

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." ? Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

So I learned then, once and for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter.

So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air!

Più divento vecchio, più vividamente ricordo cose che non sono avvenute.

le Dieu que tu te forges n'est qu'une chimère dont la sotte existence ne se trouva jamais que dans la tête des fous ; c'est un fantôme inventé par la méchanceté des hommes, qui n'a pour but que de les tromper, ou de les armer les uns contre les autres.

To dash a half-truth in the world's eyes is the surest way of blinding it altogether.