Quotes About Illusion

To be sure you know no actual good of me, but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love.

In concreto, il mondo colorato, rumoroso e soprattutto fasullo che ci sta intorno, è l'erede del sogno romantico di una rinascita del mito, del fatto che la ragione deve essere sostituita dal sogno. Piuttosto che razionalista, come spesso la si dipinge, la modernità, almeno dal romanticismo in avanti, è stata in buona parte mitologica e anti-illuminista, e l'esito del postmoderno si pone, in piena coerenza, in questa linea di sviluppo.

He shook his head to clear it, but the world grew dark and angry and would not stay upright. The world did not like to be shaken. He understood that now. He wouldn't shake it again. He felt his feet sliding away from him on silent roller skates and reached for a wall for support. The wall cursed and dug its fingers into his arm, and was probably not a wall. It was probably a person.

Surrounded both by plain women of flesh and blood and by beauteous women on pasteboard, the undergraduate is the easiest victim of living loveliness—is as a fire ever well and truly laid, amenable to a spark.

There's too much dressing up and not enough places to go.

They realized that the best way to mask what they were doing was to hide it in plain sight. Instead of lying about the sweeps themselves, they just lied about what they were sweeping for.

The burning beast suddenly vanished in a puff of smoke.

Scherz ist die drittbeste Tarnung. Die zweitbeste: Sentimentalität. Aber die beste und sicherste Tarnung ist immer noch die blanke und nackte Wahrheit. Komischerweise. Die glaubt niemand.

I really began to feel that the young were beyond me. I often appeared to myself a deceiver. Why? I didn't want to undermine her belief that Tivoli surpassed anything I had ever seen anywhere and that an afternoon in Tivoli, for example, was happiness squared; but I just couldn't feel that way about it.

Chaos is not dangerous until it begins to look orderly.

illusory transparency of intent.

Perhaps I made him up, and what I once had was not Chinese-sight at all but child-sight that would have disappeared eventually without such struggle.

Must not a poet hunt the unicorn through bush and bramble, through snow and fire, over desert and mountain, through thickets and over long barren roads even though he suspects sometimes that the unicorn does not exist- or exists only in his imagination?

There is a much-loved region in the American fantasy where pale white women float eternally under black magnolia trees, and white men with soft hands brush wisps of wisteria from the creamy shoulders of their lady loves. Harmonious black music drifts like perfume through this precious air, and nothing of a threatening nature intrudes. The South I returned to, however, was flesh-real and swollen-belly poor.

We wear the mask that grins and lies. It shades our cheeks and hides our eyes. This debt we pay to human guile With torn and bleeding hearts… We smile and mouth the myriad subtleties. Why should the world think otherwise In counting all our tears and sighs. Nay let them only see us while We wear the mask.

It's hard to make the prettiest clothes fit a miserable man.

We are sa blind as we want to be

They grow the fruit, But eat the rind

Use a minute feel some sorrow for the folks who think tomorrow is a place that they can call up on the phone. Take a month and show some kindness for the folks who thought that blindness was an illness that affected eyes alone.

Soft grey ghosts crawl up my sleeve to peer into my eyes while I within deny their threats and answer them with lies

His room smelled of cooked grease, Lysol, and age, but his face believed the freshness of his words, and I had no heart nor art to drag him back to the reeking reality of our life and times.

Sometimes it was better not to ever live the fantasy. Because when reality descended, it outlined in stark detail just how much the real world sucked.

Life isn't a romance novel. The truth is, the reason romance novels sell so well ---- the reason why everyone loves them ---- is because no one's life is actually like that. Everyone WANTS their life to be like that.

Looks can be deceiving.