Quotes About Illusion

Perhaps to them the first condition for anything having real charm was this: that it must not really exist.

Qué pasaría si vuestro Luis Felipe dijera al vernos a nosotros tan a gusto en el infierno: Esto es una farsa, un engaño. Esta gente ha estado en el infierno desde su nacimiento.?

The Days can spin yarns that seem so real that if one of them told you a tale about a blizzard, you'd get frostbite even if you were standing in your kitchen on the hottest day of the year.

A normal human being… does not exist.

But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.

The rest of the night was an endless dream sequence directed by David Lynch

My uncle Bob sees the whole world in a fun-house mirror, TRUST NO ONE lipsticked luridly across its bowed face.

But I knew that, both in fairyland and the real world, too, wishes were a slipperier things.

But the most fantastical of my imaginary worlds turned out to be the one I'd thought was real. As a child, I believed the world was run by competent, sane and benevolent adults. I believed this for much longer than I believed in Santa Claus. That belief has since gone down like the Titanic (on which I also spent a lot of time as a child). The world is run by nitwits and psychopaths.

Every miracle's got a mundane explanation. [...] and you can choose - you can look at the wonderous surface or you can look at the crud beneath. I want to see the wondrous, believe me. I just know it isn't going to be there when I've finished looking.

Hope was evil. It seduced you, then it dropped you on your ass so hard and so fast that you were worse off than when you started.

Forever was never as long as you thought it was.

Claire had realized a long time ago that if you lie with enough conviction, you can usually fool yourself.

It was a triptych, three canvases hinged together to make one image when it was open, another image when it was closed. He had always assumed she liked the duplicity of the piece. It was just like Angie, one thing inside, another out.

Or was she making a connection that wasn't there, like an amputee who still feels a missing arm or leg long after it's gone?

the great thing about lying was people believed it so long as the lie was close enough to the truth. Lena

if you lie with enough conviction, you can usually fool yourself.

Even truth can be deceptive, whatever its appearance.

It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.

Thus, in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are to a greater extent governed by material forces.

It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Perseus wore a magic cap so that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over our own eyes and ears so as to deny that there are any monsters.