Quotes About Illusion

The logic behind magic is that we create what we are imagining.

Mary Gaitskill

The singer's voice is thin and fake, but it's pretty, and somewhere in the fakery is the true sadness of smallness and failure and believing in beautiful things that aren't real because that's the only way to get through.

I've plumb forgot where I am for the instant, which is how a good lie should take you. At the same time, I'm more where I was inside myself than before Daddy started talking, which is how lies can tell you the truth.

When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they're absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.

I've plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you.

her parents roared around in the masks of monsters. Not

i wonder how many women are painting themselves into movie girls while they sleep angling their faces alien to themselves, an unnecessary surrender to things that kill them, to things that are not real I tell myself in the mirror, applying the second coat of mascara: these things are not real

Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated.

I had believed something probably not true, yet it was wonderful to have believed it.

life is real, and pain is real, but death is an imposter

and how could anyone believe that anything in this world is only what it appears to be— that anything is ever final— that anything, in spite of its absence, ever dies a perfect death?

What kind of spell do you think Teddy is under?" said Annie. "Who knows?" said Jack.

At an Italian deli counter, a whiff of butyric acid reads as parmesan cheese; elsewhere, vomit.

Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial. Physicians and anatomy students must learn to think of cadavers as wholly unrelated to the people they once were.

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!--Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

Si la mentira se parece tanto a la verdad, ¿quién puede creer en la felicidad?

Pero debemos vivir, no representar, nuestras vidas; siguiendo una sombra, perdí la realidad.

Vi cómo se marchitaba y acababa por perderse la belleza; cómo la corrupción de la muerte reemplazaba la mejilla encendida; cómo los prodigios del ojo y del cerebro eran la herencia del gusano.

Was my dream but a mirror of the truth?

Waar eindigde zijn geloof en waar begonnen de komedie en de berekening?

Every single one of us goes through life depending on and bound by our individual knowledge and awareness. And we call it reality. However, both knowledge and awareness are equivocal. One's reality might be another's illusion. We all live inside our own fantasies, don't you think?

Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call "reality". However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions?