Quotes About Illusion

Chance imagined himself no stranger to the machinations by which people went about establishing the architecture of their own imprisonment, the citadels from whose basement windows one might on occasion hear their cries. Like Houdini, we construct the machinery of our entrapment from which we must finally escape or die.

It's the far-off cows that wear the biggest horns.

So it turns out that if you bang two halves of a horse together, it doesn't make the sound of a coconut.

People don't want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in.

Beauty, when it is not a promise of happiness, must be destroyed.

Behind him the holograms above the Palace faded in the early sun. In his mind, they burned.

Like a lot of common sense, they may seem obvious but they are wrong. The creative capacities of generations of people have been sacrificed needlessly to an academic illusion.

Both the old and new physics were dealing with shadow-symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact - forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality.

I was hell-bent on being an effective humanitarian in Cambodia and Somalia. But a naïve fog is finally lifting. Revealed is a train wreck of illusions, the depravity of someone else's war, the futility of a competence stillborn there. To understand this you have to become this.

walk out to the middle of the road and look both ways, trying to determine in which direction town might be. To the left, nothing but dry fields. To the right, the same. No shade, no life. Just the blazing Kenyan sun in front, and behind me, at the hotel, a cruel pantomime of Africa played out in blackface, replete with rich, tanned Euro-travelers demanding afternoon cocktails from illiterate Kenyan waiters in bow ties and white jackets.

The world should have been in Technicolour, but seemed more like black and white.

But if your precious illusion should turn out not to be real, where then will you leap, my little flea?

What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.

A man of little learning deems that little a great deal; a frog, never having seen the ocean, considers its well a great sea.

You make yourself go to sleep. You just tell yourself it's a dream.

A doorway is a hopeless hiding place.

Like in a dream, everything seemed to be on the point of vanishing but at the same time ablaze with persistent reality.

Language has shaped our expectations so extensively that real reality has become the most detached and incomprehensible one of all.

Pero había que creer. Había que simular no creer, y en realidad creer.

Sólo un loco podía renunciar a un status quo imaginario. Sólo un loco podía adoptar lo real de la realidad.

cuando veía actuar a uno de sus «colegas», estaba en la misma situación que un niño de cinco años: le parecía magia.

Tiene razón Laiseca: la grandeza y la eficacia de un mago se mide por su renuncia al uso de la magia. El mago de verdad, el más grande, es el más pobre y desamparado de los mortales. Porque entre su magia y su persona se interpone el olvido, en la forma del mundo.

We won't be deceivedby titles such as Indispensable and Unique and Great.Someone else indispensable and unique and greatcan always be found at a moment's notice.

Some things are only real because they represent what we think. When we learn the truth and think it, the old reality is no longer real to us and loses its hold on us. The truth sets us free.