Quotes About Illusion

film and calculus, both pornographies of flight.

You are off on a winding and difficult road, which you conceive to be wide and straight, an Autobahn you can travel at your ease. Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion? I don't know whether you'll listen, or ignore it. You only want to know about your path, your Autobahn.

What I mean is something like a closed circuit. Everybody on the same frequency. And after a while you forget about the rest of the spectrum and start believing that this is the only frequency that counts or is real. While outside, all up and down the land, there are these wonderful colors and x-rays and ultraviolets going on.

A market need no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself-its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened-that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable...

She wondered, wondered, shuffling back through a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn't she be first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer's deck, any odd one readily clear to a trained eye.

Oh, THE WORLD OVER THERE, it's So hard to explain! Just-like, a dream's-got, lost in yer brain!

Increasingly she's finding it harder to tell the 'real' NYC from translations like Zigotisopolis... as if she keeps getting caught in a vortex taking her farther back in time into the virtual world. Certainly unforeseen in the original business plan, there arises now a possibility that DeepArcher is about to overflow out into the perilous gulf between screen and face.

A pneumatic toy frog hops onto a lily pad, trembling. Beneath the surface, lies terror.

All the time we were growing up, Frank said, you wanted to run away and join the carnival? Yes, and there I was with all o' you, right in the carnival, and didn't even know it. And he hoped he'd always be able to recall the way she laughed then.

Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, smoldering as if always just about to explode into open flames.

the casting had been typically Hollywood: they didn't look or act a bit alike.

Thomas Pynchon

makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever

A viewing population brought back to its default state, dumb struck, undefended, scared shitless.

They'd never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them.

He had no illusions about what could be done in the darkroom to enhance a human image, but Erlys, who had always been beautiful, was beyond all that now. Years of bitterness about how little she loved him sloughed away and Merle understood, miles down the line, the simple truth that Erlys had no more been his than the unfortunate Bert Snidells's, and that to persist in that belief anymore was to approach the gates of the laughing academy.

Alcuni di noi, però, pur non andando da nessuna parte, ingannano se stessi, convincendosi invece che stanno andando da qualche parte: per ingannarsi a questo modo ci vuole una specie di talento naturale, e le obiezioni che si levano a questo riguardo sono rare, ma ciò nonostante insidiose.

Oh well, 'really'— it's like a woman isn't it, you look at each other, you think Of course not, she thinks Of course not,— yet the Alternatives hang about, don't they, like Wraiths.

You think you'd rather hear about what you call 'life' ... But it's only another illusion. A very clever robot. The more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows. Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of original waste over greater and greater masses of city. Structurally, they are the strongest in compression. A smokestack can survive any explosion - even the shock wave from one of the new cosmic bombs...

The ostrich burying its head in the sand does at any rate wish to convey the impression that its head is the most important part of it.

Query: Why am I so bitter against Life? And why do I see her as a rag-picker on the American cinema, shuffling along wrapped in a filthy shawl with her old claws crooked over a stick? Answer: The direct result of the American cinema acting upon a weak mind.

America is a country without death. Everything is shiny and new to make you forget such a thing exists.

Later, she would wonder if her feelings for a person depended on the way she perceived them. Where do feelings come from? she wondered. From a brief, variable impression? From a shifting point of view that's then replaced by an illusion that you project onto the other person?

For Dennis Rader, life was good—both of them.