Quotes About Illusion

For a long time, when it's working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we are. In some ways the dynamic is simple: alcohol makes everything better, until it makes everything worse.

All you had of a person was what they showed you.

There is a very pervasive web of falsehoods that the dreamer must wake from in order to start on her path. These are the lies of the mad world, the system of delusion maintained by human drama and ignorance.

Because as long as the hungry ghost believes that only the deprivation he already perceives is real, he will continue to perceive only deprivation. That's the vicious circle.

Theory has all too often been a zoo in which we cage the wild beasts of violence that inhabit our worlds. We then gaze at these beasts from a safe distance, we contemplate them, we theorize how they would act in their own environments - and we never go to those environments where the beasts roam freely to actually check our theories. To do so would be disastrous. It would point out the absurdity of our analyses and the illusion of safety so carefully crafted.

This is happening; this is not fiction. And the thing about life? It doesn't have texture at all. Go ahead, feel the space around you. Do it now. See? It's nothing but air.

That's the fundamental flaw in the illusion that writers like to maintain, the idea that we can craft anything approaching the truth. No matter how richly we imagine, no matter how vividly we set the scene, we never come close to the unambiguous realness of the moment itself.

You can't find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well.

Good anecdote--bad reality.

We often assume that when the surface offers so little the depth must be unfathomable.

I thought I was only seeing half the man But that was all there was to you You

Fui al Museo de Madame Tussauds a ver mi figura de cera. Bueno, en realidad no soy yo, porque no es la de alguien tendida en la cama viendo viejas películas en la tele, bebiendo una Coca-Cola con una mano y apartando la lengua de su perro Gary con la otra.

One not only has to read between the lines, one has to fill him in altogether. Because he's not there. To make him important in one's life requires an overactive imagination. Unfortunately, mine never knows when to quit.

You can set up housekeeping on one side of the looking glass or the other--the side that makes big things small or small things big.

It was hiding in plain sight. Mocking the suggestion that anything was going on; therefore, it couldn't be true. A technique I like to use to this day.

But George actually does have a point, because you know when they send out those space probes and they beam back footage of what it looks like up there? All those films ever show are sand and rocks. I've never seen a bra in any of that footage.

I could've given you so much but you wanted so little ... I tried to read between your lines as you would so rarely speak but I gave you far more credit than you were actually due you see I thought I was only seeing half the man but that was all there was to you

Not that I've ever had much use for reality—having spent much of what I laughingly refer to as my adult life attempting to escape it with the assistance of a variety of drugs.)

Nobody is perfect, though. We all want everyone to think we are, but perfection is some crazy mythical state that we can never achieve. It is a goal beyond our grasp, always shifting and changing and taunting us, because it knows...it knows we can never reach it.

She is a beautiful creature, but beauty doesn't equal good and it certainly doesn't equal sane.

Perfection is some mythical state that we can never achieve

I don't think we ever find anything, do we? I mean in life. We think we find things and then it turns out those things aren't what we thought.

A part of me does not want to think that I always knew something was wrong.=. This is probably the same part that didn't look at the evidence that was right before my eyes, and even though I know this, it does not stop me from defending the fairy tale.

All you know is what you think you know, but that isn't always what's real.