Quotes About Illusion

Those who harbour illusions about the possibility of a purely political struggle and the power of this or that formula or system, with no new human quality as its exact counterpart, have learned no lessons from the past.

Wondering aloud, If we were orcs, wouldn't we, at a racial level, imagine ourselves to look like elves?

In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes.

But you know exactly what kind of world we live in. It ain't no fucking Middle-earth.

It's like Abuela says: Every snake always thinks it's biting into a rat until the day it bites into a mongoose. That

I had expected a different father, one about seven feet tall with enough money to buy our entire barrio, but this one was average height, with an average face.

Why can't we find what we are looking for?" the answer is that we DO find what we are looking for, but what we are looking for is not what we really want. What we are looking for is things that remind us of the god of our childhood, but this god was not an accurate guide to the virtues and sensations that we really want.

The lie had worked so far, but Lacey felt its softness, like a floor of rotten boards beneath her feet.

City of memories, city of mirrors.

It was funny, Grey thought. Not funny ha-ha but funny strange, the whole idea of time. He'd thought it was one thing but it was actually another.

It was like leading people to the edge of a cliff, showing them the view, and then shoving them off.

We look no deeper into things because we do not desire this; neither are we meant to. That is the design of the world, to trick us into believing it is one thing, when it's entirely another.

You're not Shade Vassily,' the Doctor said. 'You just think you are.' And he reached up and took off Repple's face. 'Sorry.' He stepped aside, allowing Repple to see his own reflection.

You're not Shade Vassily,' the Doctor said. 'You just think you are.' And he reached up and took off Repple's face. 'Sorry.' He stepped aside, allowing Repple to see his own reflection in the glass wal behind. 'Really, l am.

It worked better than she had hoped. Even husband Gerald gasped in surprise, and seemed to be trying to push the table back down—into the floor. George too seemed taken in, bless him.

We lived under the shadow and cover of such naiveté.

I had always felt a foreigner in this made-up Land of Beautiful, and it was a relief to see Extreme Beauty for what it really was: fake, make-believe, insubstantial.

Which one looked more real? Which side more beautiful?

Physical beauty wasn't the same as True Beauty, any more than pretty ugly meant truly ugly or Magnetic North meant True North.

Ever the collector of treasure maps that promised the world but led nowhere.

Error never shows itself in its naked reality, in order not to be discovered. On the contrary, it dresses elegantly, so that the unwary may be led to believe that it is more truthful than truth itself.

The notion that we read the New Testament exactly as the early Christians did, without any weight of tradition coloring our interpretation, is an illusion. It is also a dangerous illusion, for it tends to absolutize our interpretation, confusing it with the Word of God.

Error never shows itself in its naked reality, in order not to be discovered. On the contrary, it dresses elegantly, so that the unwary may be led to believe that it is more truthful than truth itself. IRENAEUS OF LYONS

Memories are tricky; there's what you remember, and what you think you remember, the editions and redactions of memory, the corrections and amendations and blundered readings and the whole apparatus criticus of the conscious mind trying to make bread out of soup.