Quotes About Illusion

It's odd, though, what makes you think about the truth. It's so rarely involved in the events of your life. I quit thinking about the truth for a time then. Its finer points seems impossible to find among the facts.

Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her--the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke.

Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done. Virginia

No hagas juicios en tres dimensiones de lo que sólo puedes ver en la pantalla de un televisor.

Humans, short- lived and locked out of the gray places for life, do not do well with uncertainty. If they cannot have what might, what could, what should, and perhaps most awful of all what should have been, then they will dream it up instead, imagine it into being in whatever twisted or beautiful form suits, and then drive their fellows to their knees in chains by the thousand and million to pretend in chorus that it is so.

What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me.

Real monsters will always disappoint. The unseen threat, the rumour, is a far greater power.

If they cannot have what might, what could, what should, and perhaps most awful of all what should have been, then they will dream it up instead, imagine it into being in whatever twisted or beautiful form suits, and then drive their fellows to their knees in chains by the thousand and million to pretend in chorus that it is so.

the truth was far more complex, and ultimately far more scary. But who in this universe wants the truth?

You know, the aspirants believe this is the only true existence. That everything outside is an illusion, a shadow play created by the ancestor gods to cradle us until we can build our own tailored reality and Upload into it. That's comforting, isn't it.

We sit here, three silhouettes carved from electronic sleet in the difference storm, and you talk like a cheap period drama. Limited vision, lieutenant, limited vision. Where is the voice that said altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said we would be angels.

we opt for setting our limits at the point where we feel assured of success. Living within these bounds, we may feel stifled ... despairing ... But, yes, we do feel safe. And safety is a very expensive illusion ... Usually, when we say we can't do something, what we mean is that we won't do something unless we can guarantee that we'll do it perfectly.

There were times when he wanted to tell Greenie, outright, that her mother was not the generous, loving woman Greenie presumed her to be, but he knew better. Maybe some fortunate children were born with platinum emotional shields, protecting them from harm and keeping them, also harmlessly, oblivious.

How odd it felt to share a kitchen most mornings with a man whose face she had seen in the news, without caring, for years. She was no longer intimidated, but sometimes she saw him across the room and thought that he must be a hologram, a figment.

He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.

Flaubert] didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition.

How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren't living under Communism!

Books are not life, however much we may wish they were

What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents- were they the stuff of Literature?

She'd been imagining for the last fifteen or more years that if you disappeared, if you abandoned a wife and child, you did so for a better life: more happiness, more sex, more money, more of whatever was missing from your previous life.

In truth, he was just another man, behaving as men did in books, and she was just another woman for believing otherwise.