Quotes About Illusion

In other words, in order to believe in what we think our nation stands for, we must constantly, every day, in small acts or thoughts and large, deceive ourselves

Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine. Perhaps this is an illusion all lovers have about themselves: that they escape both category and description.

Se había imaginado que, en el mundo moderno, el tiempo y el lugar ya no eran importantes en las historias de amor. Al mirar atrás vio que habían desempeñado en la suya una función más grande de lo que había pensado. Había sucumbido a la antigua, continuada, indeleble ilusión: que de algún modo los amantes están fuera del tiempo.

She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present.

Dovrebbe apparirci ovvio come il tempo per noi non agisca affatto da fissativo, ma piuttosto da solvente. Solo che credere questo non conviene, non serve; non aiuta a tirare avanti; perciò fingiamo di non saperlo.

When we killed - or exiled - God we also killed ourselves. Did we notice sufficiently at the time? No God, no afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him, of course, this long-standing imaginary friend of ours. And we weren't going to get an afterlife anyway. But we sawed off the branch we were sitting on. And the view from there, from that height - even if it was only the illusion of a view - wasn't so bad.

We think we're so clever. And yet we're always surprised to find ourselves entrapped or made fools of.

Perhaps that's its strength. The flexibility. The fragility. Appearances…" He paused. "…are often deceiving.

the biggest lie people tell themselves is that they prefer to know the truth.

At times, circumstances conspire to make us believe the lies we tell ourselves. Everything- the weather, the season, the fall of light- sets the stage for our play; we find ourselves, instead of acting, becoming the characters, moving into a reality in which we're inseparable from our roles.

There are moments when the filament of time bends, loops, blurs. The present becomes permeable; the past leaps forward and insists itself upon us without warning. The orderly progression of our days reveals itself to be a lie, and the sense making brain flounders. What was he supposed to call this impossibility that insisted itself before him as reality? A hallucination? Deja vu, that cheap cinematic trick of the mind?

Is it a blessing in disguise, or is it just a disguise? And if it's just a disguise, then what is it disguising?

Everybody thinks about film, everybody knows films are made somewhere out there, and it's interesting," he said. "But very little is known about what goes on because all of us lie.

In the old tales, when people undertake quests, they find themselves fighting dragons or serpents or giant dogs. Or maybe a dark warrior of some kind, folk who are enemies from the start. But it's far more frightening when someone seems friendly and good, and turns out to be different altogether. The odd and uncanny are not terrifying in themselves. The most disturbing thing is the ordinary turned strange. Things familiar and safe becoming not right.

En aquel momento tenía la sensación de haber accedido bruscamente a otro mundo, había ascendido a una altura vertiginosa, al cenit del éxtasis. Aquello era la realidad, y el pasado una mera ilusión. Estábamos solos, abrazados… Tal vez lo que estaba haciendo acabaría conmigo, pero esos momentos durarían eternamente.

deseaba tomar una esposa y vivir como un hombre normal... no para engañar a otros, sino para engañarse a sí mismo, convencerse de que no era diferente en modo alguno de otros hombres.

My head was a stage wrapped in a curtain of black velvet, and on the stage stood a single actress, named Naomi.

Again, and yet again, I looked back at the actor's hands, comparing them with my own; and there was no difference between them. Yet strangely the hands of the man on the stage were indescribably beautiful, while those on my knees were but ordinary hands.

Those touched-up images were not what her mirrors had been telling her for some time.

If one clung too closely to reality, the result might well be far from realistic.

While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.

Lo que tú necesitas no soy yo: seguro que es un espejo. Pues cualquier otro que no seas tú no pasa de ser, para ti, más que un espejo en donde reflejarte. Yo, desde luego, no tengo el propósito de volver a un desierto de espejos como ese

The reason men somehow go on living, enduring the gaze of others, is that they bargain on the hallucinations and inexactitude of human eyes.

Tal vez correspondiera decir que, más que perder la pasión, la habían congelado de tanto idealizarla.