Quotes About Illusion

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

We all float down here!

We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story's just a story

The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.

Passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones.

Life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday.

Time continued to pass - the oldest trick in the world, and maybe the only one that really is magic.

this life we think we're living isn't real. It's just a shadow play, and I for one will be glad when the lights go out on it. In the dark, all the shadows disappear.

Doesn't look like a monster, does he?" "They rarely do.

I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

And I wonder if there is really any point to what I'm doing, or what I'm supposed to make of a world where a man can get rich playing let's pretend

They say that loving eyes can never see, but that's a fool's axiom. Sometimes, they see too much

But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.

There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal Once upon a time.

All you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more than a disguised version of what you already knew.

Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

It was no dream she said. Dreams fade. Reality doesn't.

Make-up covers a multitude of sins.

We rarely get what we imagine in this world.

I don't want to see it anymore. It's lousy. And it's a cheat. You build it all around something... set yourself on something... and then you don't want it. Isn't it too bad the great truths are all such lies?

if you tell yourself the great lie of bad art-that you are in charge-your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty.

What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.