Quotes About Illusion

Reality whistles a different tune underwater.

A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.

The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.

Salvador Dali and fifty cents will get you a cup of clock melt.

Magic things are fond of deceptions.

Unfortunately, little darlings, there is no such thing as a simple love story.The most transitory puppy crush is complex to the extent of lying beyond the far reaches of the brain's understanding.

For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self. For the unconscionable, political reactivism was seductive because it seemed to protect one's holdings and legitimize one's greed. But both sides were gazing through a kerchief of illusion.

A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time.

Is that man's fate: to spend his closest hours to truth longing for a lie?

How could you be so naive as to tell a human being the truth? Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion. That sort of thing. If you wish to gain the favor of the two-legged ilk, you must learn to fabricate as wholeheartedly as they do.

Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.

What looks to be a wisp of cloud is actually the moon, narrow and pale like a paring snipped from a snowman's toenail.

Originality is a myth perpetuated by the naive, the romantic, and the unscrupulous.

Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion. That sort of thing.

Life still begins in the womb, cocky erections still collapse and lie useless when woman's superior sexuality is finished with them, but men control the divine channels now, and while that control may be largely an illusion, their laws, institutions, and elaborate weaponry exist primarily to maintain it.

Just as the overturned bucket that was once brimming seems so much emptier than the bucket that never held milk in the first place. Thanks for filling my little pail.

Who knows what causes the human brain to split its britches. It would seem that the brain hangs so many curtains between itself and the true universe that eventually light can no longer reach it, and it molds and rots and festers in the dark.

It is not a heart: light, heavy, kind or broken; dear, hard, bleeding or transplanted; it is not a heart.

Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion

There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don't you see?! We're actors - we're the opposite of people!

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.

Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

No, no, no... you've got it all wrong... you can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen ---it's not gasps and blood and falling about---that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man failing to reappear, that's all ---now you see him, now you don't, that the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back---an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.