Quotes About Illusion

We all believe we are in complete control. When really, we do not know the beginning, middle or end.

You look as scary as a buttered muffin.

This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got.

Or maybe, and I like to hope it was this one, because the truth is more intricate and less attainable than I used to understand, a bright illusive place reached by twisting back roads as often as by straight avenues, and this was the closest I could come.

When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them. Unless Daniel was bluffing, he had made one last mistake, the same one he had been making all along. He was seeing the other four not as they were but as they should have been, could have been in some softer-edged and warmer world.

They always act like they're having an amazing time, they're louder and high-pitched, shoving each other and screaming with laughter at nothing. But Becca knows what they're like when they're happy, and that's not it. Their faces on the way home afterwards look older and strained, smeared with the scraps of leftover expressions that were pressed on too hard and won't lift away.

He hated the way every drug in its different way scooped the solidity right out of the world and left it quicksand-textured, cracked across and wavering at the edges. They did the same thing to people: people on drugs stopped being what you knew them to be.

He hated the way every drug in its different way scooped the solidity right out of the world and left it quicksand-textured, cracked across and wavering at the edges. They did the same thing to people: people on drugs stopped being what you knew them to be. They looked you right in the face and saw things that had nothing to do with you.

Equality is paper-deep, peel it away with a fingernail.

Everyone's thought that: maybe even if , maybe we still could , maybe small bits of precious things can be salvaged. No one with cop-on thinks it after the first try. But her voice, quiet and sad, shimmering the air into those pearly colors: for a second I believed it, all over again.

two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature.

It's taken me this long to start thinking about what luck can be, how smoothly and deliciously deceptive, how relentlessly twisted and knotted in on its own hidden places, and how lethal.

At first I barely recognized it as a person; stripped of substance by the bright sunfall through the leaves, flutter of white T-shirt, confusing gold swirl of hair, white brushstroke face and dense dark smudges of eyes, it had something illusory about it, as if my mind had conjured it from patches of light and shadow and at any moment it might break up and be gone.

a cipher, composed entirely of the jumbled reflections of what he thinks other people want to see.

I had come to think of my memories as solid, shining little tings, to be hunted out and treasured, and it was deeply unsettling to think that they might be fool's gold, tricky and fog-shaped and not at all what they seemed.

men say, that false Dreams hold, clinging

I want my daughter to learn that not everything in this world is determined by how often she hears it or how much she wants it to be true or how many other people are looking. Somewhere in there, for a thing to count as real, there has got to be some actual bloody reality.

When you know someone in the flesh, you know that person only in part," he told her. "A man's teachings are more important than his flesh form. Flesh is an illusion.

Go nowhere on a horse that fades, for your dreams will betray you.

Better the comfort of a lie than the absurdity of the truth.

Nothing is ever what it seems and not everything is yours to see.

This would explain how our schemas shape so powerfully the way things seem, almost as though they cast a spell over us.

Thoughts have no solidity, but merely the appearance of solidity because of the power we give them.

These emotional habits operate as powerful lenses on our reality, leading us to mistake how things seem for how they actually are.