Quotes About Illusion

That I was apparently into body building at all at this stage in my life probably meant affairs with young women, for whom a youthful physique might ameliorate the unavoidable emotional consequences of sleeping with an older man in what at root would be little more than an exchange of sex and the illusion of immortality for Ferragamo handbags and the other implicit currencies of such arrangements. All of which the yakuza would understand, and even respect.

Rationalization was my narcotic. And, as with all drugs, over time, I habituated to mine. I needed more and more to accomplish less and less. Eventually, there was no dose at all that could confer the comfort I craved.

Barry Eisler

Barry Eisler

Barry Eisler

I played baccarat at the upscale Bellagio; roulette at the off-strip Rio; craps at the fading Riviera, whose attempts to match the gayness and glitter around her felt forced, artificial, like makeup layered on by a woman who recognizes she was never beautiful to begin with and has now, in addition, grown colorless and old.

Memory, the whole lying opera of it.

Fraud, my children! Fraud and forgery. Dry rot covered with paint and gilded with lies

What looks attractive in prospect doesn't always look so good in practice.

The player is always trapped in his own play but he must never allow the spectators to suspect this, they must always think that he is free. Thus the great art of the player is not in showing but in concealing.

In spite of having no body they stand and move, think and talk; in short, it's as if their naked souls were walking about clad in the semblance of their bodies.

The picture that bowls you over at first sight and the next day loses even the power to attract your attention is one that looks always the same. It has a moment of life but dies immediately thereafter.

He could not even kid himself that everything had not been up front, because it had been. And he hadn't even done it alone. There were currently ninety-five other fools in this parade.

Time is a face on the water.

Childhood itself is a myth for almost all of us. We think we remember what happens to us when we were kids, but we don't.

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common

I thought there would be time, but we always think stuff like that, don't we? We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

The world's most brilliant confabulators are in asylums.

I think tempus est umbra in mente is a better one. Roughly translated, it means time is a shadow in the mind.

He (Tom Riley) gestured toward the canvases in the main room. What are they, really? I mean, no bullshit. Because - I wouldn't say this to very many people - they remind me of the way life was inside my head when I wasn't taking my pills. They're just make-believe, I (Edgar) said. Shadows. I know about shadows, he said. You just want to be careful they don't grow teeth. Because they can. Then, sometimes when you reach for the light-switch to make them go away, you discover the power's out.

Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage.

reality is a thin skim of ice over a deep lake of dark water.

It's really just paint. I muse on that, sometimes, Jamie. When I can't sleep. How a little paint can make shallow water seem deep.

In America, where surface has always passed for substance, people always believe guys like Frank Dunning.