Quotes About Illusion

Anything that a batsman cannot pick from the wrist is deception.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

Long before the writer Gillian Flynn popularized the concept of the insufferable 'Cool Girl,' who doesn't exist except in men's fervent fantasies, Hugh Hefner dreamed her, undressed her, and put her in his magazine.

Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that.

Life is a racket. Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything's a racket.

In the lives of children, pumpkins can turn into coaches, mice and rats into human beings. When we grow up, we learn that it's far more common for human beings to turn into rats.

But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don't lie about men, only women.

But this was fancy; she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn't done before.

But what is character? How solid? We cut our hair, we shave our beards, we lose a limb. We remain ourselves. In dreams, however, we swap identities licentiously. We sabotage the structures of our character without a thought.

Those who are roped into bed at night often fall into delusions of flight.

She was of an age that took other people's lives to be pretty fictions, useful merely for adorning the invisible membrane that contained her own singular and glorious existence.

Noon is a disguise of whiteness put on by the eternal Night behind it.

It doesn't pose or represent the world. It becomes.

In dreams, time may eddy and distort, but even when it traffics in the past, it does so in the guise of the present moment

I don't believe in the concept of 'real' or 'realer' people. You don't? She smiled, not nicely. When I do disappear again, dearie, I'll surely be less real than I am now.

In the lives of children, pumpkins can turn into coaches, mice and rats into human beings. When we grow up, we learn that it's far more common for human beings to turn into rats.

In the lives of children, pumpkins can turn into coaches, mice and rats into human beings. When we grow up, we learn that it's far more common for human beings to turn into rats. Nothing

Madame Morrible, for all her upper-class diction and fabulous wardrobe, seemed just a tad—oh—dangerous. As if her big public smile were composed of the light glancing off knives and lances, as if her deep voice masked the rumbling of distant explosions. Galinda always felt as if she couldn't see the whole picture.

How very like a dream this all is.

A world emerging, daily, out of nothing, a world that we trust to resemble what we've seen previously. We should know better.

Getting in control of our possessions makes us feel more in control of our fates. If this is an illusion, it's a helpful illusion--and it's a more pleasant way to live.

Lack of Control Loophole: Weirdly, we often have an illusion of control over things we can't control—"If I spend a lot of time worrying, the plane is less likely to crash," "If I play my lucky numbers, I'll win the lottery eventually"—but deny control over things we can control ("If my cell phone buzzes, I have to check it"). We argue that circumstances force us to break a habit, but often, we have more control than we admit.

One of the persistent follies of human nature is to imagine true happiness is just out of reach.

We nonjoyous types suck energy and cheer from the joyous ones; we rely on them to buoy us with their good spirit and to cushion our agitation and anxiety. At the same time, because of a dark element in human nature, we're sometimes provoked to try to shake the enthusiastic, cheery folk out of their fog of illusion—to make them see that the play was stupid, the money was wasted, the meeting was pointless. Instead of shielding their joy, we blast it.