Quotes About Illusion

Stardom is just an uneasy seat on top of a tricky toboggan. Being a star is merely perching at the head of the downgrade. A competent featured player can last a lifetime. A star, a year or two. There's all that agony of finding suitable stories, keeping in character, maintaining illusion.

By binding image and desire, glamour gives us pleasure, even as it heightens our yearning. It leads us to feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more.

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

Let's stop trading freedom for the illusion of security.

Tradition is the illusion of permanance.

Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.

Somewhere along the line, positive thinking seems to have been confused with magical thinking. There's a notion that if you think positively enough, you can make anything happen by using the power of your mind. All the positive thinking in the world won't deliver good fortune or prevent tragedy from striking.

It does no good to believe in what does not exist to the point one cannot focus on what is real. That would be the greatest tragedy of any 'conspiracy.'

I like this other world, this forgetting of myself. The actor works in order to escape, not to find himself. You become an actor by leaving yourself, and then you have to keep acting. How tragic!

You can fool a person into going to see a movie with a good trailer.

I was on a train of lies. I couldn't jump off.

Painting is a lie. It's the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.

It's very tough to transfer ballroom technique onto the ice, to give the illusion of the proper hip motion and position, with the speed and glide of the blade.

Wish I could, through my own financial prestidigitation, transform a dollar bill into two, or two million. It is an awesome and mysterious skill.

People sometimes think that drag queens are always really confident and fearless because we transform ourselves into these beautiful creatures, and they believe that it's how we live our everyday lives.

I think A Midsummer Night's Dream would be terrific because of the transformations that occur. Or The Tempest, things like that. Extraordinary larger than life or supernatural element.

Owing to ignorance of the rope the rope appears to be a snake; owing to ignorance of the Self the transient state arises of the individualized, limited, phenomenal aspect of the Self.

Not only do I lie, I take real pleasure in lying, in the transmission of magic effects.

The transparency of a metaphor displays the glint of truth. But if a metaphor is taken for a reality, it then becomes dense and masks the truth it is meant to display.

The truth, it is said, is rarely pure or simple, yet genetics can at times seem seductively transparent.

Where is the borderland between memory and hallucination?

So you know that TV shit ain't real.

If you asked a child riding a broomstick what it was doing, the child would answer, without hesitation: 'I am riding a horse.' For that child, a stick is a horse. It is as if by merely calling something by another name, you are able to transform it into what you want it to be. By usurping God's power, you create an illusion of an instant Paradise. And no one has yet told the infant Eastern Europe that a wooden stick is not a horse.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. In