Quotes About Illusion

You have a book that's also a face?

Seeing through glamour is easy. It's people that are hard.

The more beautiful the skin is, the more deadly it is. That's what Will's like. All that pretty face and whatnot just hides how twisted up and rotten he is on the inside.

They confused beauty with innocence and harmlessness.

There's more to someone being lovable than the way they look." "...he told me that the way you can tell if a bug or a snake is poisonous, like, is if it's got really lovely, bright markings. The more the beautiful its skin is, the more deadly it is." "All that pretty face and whatnot just hides how twisted up and rotten he is on the inside.

Oh, its big enough," he said patronizingly, "but somehow I was expecting…you know." He gestured with his hands, indicating something roughly the size of a house cat. "It's the Mortal Cup, Jace, not the Mortal Toilet Bowl," said Isabelle. -Jace & Isabelle, pg.349-

Magnus: All dreams end when you wake.

Of course I can see you. I'm not blind, you know. Oh, but you are. You just don't know it.

Demons feed on death and pain madness," Valentine said. "When I kill, it is because I must. You grew up in a falsely beautiful paradise surrounded by fragile glass walls, my daughter. Your mother created the world she wanted to live in and she brought you up in it, but she never told you it was an illusion. And all the time the demons waited with their weapons of blood and terror to smash the glass and pull you free of the lie.

Simon kept pace beside Clary for a few moments without speaking before he said, "So what did I miss? Naked dancing ladies?" Clary thought of the male faerie's torn-open ribs and shuddered. "Nothing that pleasant.

One of the things he loved about Clary was how easily caught up in her imagination she was, how easily she could wall herself away in illusory worlds of curses and princes and destiny and magic. Once he had been able to do the same... Now that the real and the imagined had collided, he wondered if she, like he, longed for the past, for the normal. He wondered if normalcy was something, like a vision or silence, you didn't realize it was precious until you lost it.

It was part of what had made him so good at manipulating people - he could present them with what they wanted to see. And what made it so powerful was that at some level, it was real.

Enchantée , says the key in my hand. When I try to turn it, it turns to sand.

It was often said that the clothes made the man. He was now inclined to believe, rather, that one saw what one expected to see.

God, I've been like Don Quixote, fencing with windmills, searching for vengeance

I have walked a stair of swords, I have worn a coat of scars. I have vowed with hollow words, I have lied my way to the stars -Songs of Sapphique

I remember a story of a girl in Paradise who ate an apple once. Some wise Sapient gave it to her. Because of it she saw things differently. What had seemed gold coins were dead leaves. Rich clothes were rags of cobweb. And she saw there was a wall around the world, with a locked gate.

If a speculum is polished sufficiently, it becomes invisible. For it doth reflect all about it, so that the eye sees only that which is shown , not the devyse that showeth it. And if a man becomes hard as diamond, faceted and flawed, he too will show nothing of himself, onlie the fractured images of his world.

That is the delusion of which I speak! You wish the joys of true love upon every milkmaid and stable boy in your land, and yet you consign yourself and another to lives of pure misery that you might possess a well-proportioned ballroom.

Often people's worst pain is built on a false premise.

These days there are a lot of people who just want to be famous. I think that comes from a naive place, because those people generally don't know what it's like.

So many times in life we think we see what we want. That we know what we want. Looking back through the wrong end of that scope, I sometimes wonder why we still believe we know anything at all.

And the best way to make someone unhappy, if not downright unbalanced, is to tell her that what she sees with her own eyes is not there at all.

The thing I'll always remember best about that time is not how quickly our family fell apart. The memorable bit was when I first looked back at how we'd convinced ourselves we'd ever been together in the first place.