Quotes About Illusion

bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed

There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark.

amateur magician himself, he had first seen Joe performing at the St. Regis for his classmate at Horace Mann, Roy Cohn, and had been impressed enough by Joe's natural movements, his solemnity, and his flawless presentations of the Miser's Dream, Rosini's Location, and the Stabbed Deck to insist that Joe be engaged to baffle his

The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed

The foolish coyote faith that could keep you flying as long as you kept kidding yourself that you could fly.

Dinner was a fur muff, a dozen clothespins, and some old dish towels boiled up with carrots. The fact that the meal was served with a bottle of prepared horseradish enabled Sammy to conclude that it was intended to pass for braised short ribs of beef - flanken. Many of Ethel's specialties arrived thus encoded by condiments.

No matter how much they tried to dress her up with neon and family entertainment she [Las Vegas] was still a whore.

There were elegantly made up women sitting on bus benches who were not really women and not really waiting for buses.

She had on a large blond wig, bright pink lipstick and enough makeup on her cheeks to frost a cupcake or

It seemed to him that every gleaming success in the city had a dark seam to it somewhere, usually just out of view.

Nathanael West's Day of the Locust.

This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't.

And entertainment has nothing to do with reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality.

Sometimes I look around my living room, and the most real thing in the room is the television. It's bright and vivid, and the rest of my life looks drab. So I turn the damn thing off. That does it every time. Get my life back.

Men under stress are fools, and fool themselves.

They want to see their expectation... Entertainment has nothing to do reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality.

entertainment has nothing to do with reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality.

But they're not real now," Wu said. "That's what I'm trying to tell you. There isn't any reality here.

As foolish, and as misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly.

The very concept of time travel makes no sense, since time doesn't flow. The fact that we think time passes is just an accident of our nervous systems—of the way things look to us. In reality, time doesn't pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren't separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations. And since the past isn't a location, you can't travel to it.

You said yourself, John, this park is entertainment," Wu said. "And entertainment has nothing to do with reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality.

your eyes or changing the subject. You were forced to deal with that person's behavior. The experience was, in the end, a loss of certain illusions. The world was not how you wanted it to be. The world was how it was.

The same people who are coldly clear-eyed about the world around them have nothing but fantasies about themselves.

Nothing is obvious.