Quotes About Illusion

In]the too solid three-dimensional city, I could never feel myself as anything but spectral, disintegrating, pointless, fluid.

The art of fiction, like the art of stage magicians, is one of directing the audience's attention to what you want them to see.

I should like you to be on the verge of love but not yet quite in it. That's a very nice state of mind, while it lasts. -But of course, I had already dived over that verge and was swimming away in a blue sea of illusion towards, I supposed, the islands of the blest, but really towards domesticity, maternity and the usual lot of womankind.

Houses are entirely different when you know them well, she thought, and on first acquaintance even more different from their real selves, more deceptive about their real character than human beings.

The young man she had fallen in love with, handsome, gay, intellectual, and domineering, melted away upon closer acquaintance, and proved to have been a chimera, never to have existed outside her imagination. Linda did not commit the usual fault of blaming Tony for what was entirely her own mistake, she merely turned from him in absolute indifference. This was made easier by the fact that she saw so little of him.

So that's what we're about then, I said. Staying safe in our gated-community faith, where we make room for God. Well, you know what? It's a fantasy and a lie.

I am a liar. All is not well. Not at all.

It's a lie that matches his desire.

It turns out that magical mice high on incense are really good at not being caught.

We're cannon fodder, and human shields, and useful new blood, and minions, and janitors and maids, and thanks to all the work the losers in here do trying to get into an alliance and an enclave after, the enclave kids get extra sleep and extra food and extra help, more than if it was only them in here. And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they're really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.

All of magic essentially involves sneaking something you want past reality while it's distracted and looking the other way.

And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they're really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.

I would have thought only that the money must have come from a strongroom somewhere, a chest full of gold like a duke would have or a tsar. I wouldn't have thought of it coming from quiet men in plain coats who didn't ride in carriages.

It looked as though someone had come through with a pump and inflated everything in the scene by thirty percent, highway and cars and all, before going away satisfied.

I put my fingers up to brush the fine links. Even lying on my skin, it still felt cool to the touch, and when I looked at myself in the mirror, in the glass I was not standing in my father's study. I was in a grove of dark winter trees, under a pale grey sky, and I could almost feel the snow falling onto my skin.

We learned the truth at seventeen," mourned a song that was popular that year, "that love was meant for beauty queens.

La belleza es sólo visual, mas real en una película o en piedra que en tres dimensiones vivas.

Maybe the morning sun is a five-cent yellow balloon, And the evening stars the joke of a God gone crazy. Maybe the mothers of the world, And the life that pours from their torsal folds— Maybe it's all a lie sworn by liars, And a God with a cackling laughter says: "I, the Almighty God, I have made all this, I have made it for kaisers, czars and kings.

Don Juan had always said to me that our great enemy is the fact that we never believe what is happening to us.

The average man is either victorious or defeated and, depending on that, he becomes a persecutor or a victim. These two conditions are prevalent as long as one does not see. Seeing dispels the illusion of victory, or defeat, or suffering.

The indulgence of denying is by far the worst; it forces us to believe we are doing great things, when in effect we are only fixed within ourselves. To

There is no beginning, the beginning is only in your thought.

But we must know first that our acts are useless and yet we must proceed as if we didn't know it. That's a sorcerer's controlled folly.

I really felt I had lost my body, don Juan. You did. You mean, I really didn't have a body? What do you think yourself? well, I don't know. All I can tell you is what I felt. That is all there is in reality - what you felt.