Quotes About Illusion

but after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter 'I.' One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter 'I.

But love – don't we all talk a great deal of nonsense about it? What does one mean? ... It's only a story one makes up in one's mind about another person, and one knows all the time it isn't true. Of course one knows; why, one's always taking care not to destroy the illusion.

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.

You're going to go on dreaming and imagining and making up stories about me as you walk along the street, and pretending that we're riding in a forest, or landing on an island —' 'No. I shall think of you ordering dinner, paying bills, doing the accounts, showing old ladies the relics —

You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very inexperienced and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about me, and now you can't separate me from the person you've imagined me to be. You call that, I suppose, being in love; as a matter of fact it's being in delusion.

For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was something concealed. So the green flame seems hidden in the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only outward; within was a wandering flame.

For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood.

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation...to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

You look, eat, smile, are bored, pleased, annoyed - that is all I know. Yet this shadow which has sat by me for an hour or two, this mask from which peep two eyes, has power to drive me back, to pinion me down among all those other faces, to shut me in a hot room; to send me dashing like a moth from candle to candle.

Life is a dream. 'Tis waking that kills us.

Half one's notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one's own.

In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances

I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.

beauty glowing, suddenly expressive, withdrawn the moment after. No one can count on it or seize it or have it wrapped in paper. Nothing is to be won from the shops, and Heaven knows it would be better to sit at home than haunt the plate-glass windows in the hope of lifting the shining green, the glowing ruby, out of them alive.

az én pedig a legkényelmesebb elnevezés bárki olyan személyre, aki valójában nincs.

Es tan duro de matar un fantasma como una realidad.

I am growing up,' she thought, taking her taper. 'I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones

The sky is blue,' he said, 'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods.

but how speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depths of the sea instead?

toda a pompa é construída sobre a corrupção; como o esqueleto jaz por baixo da carne; como nós, que dançamos e cantamos na superfície, ficaremos embaixo; como o veludo púrpura se transforma em pó; como o anel (aqui Orlando, inclinando sua lanterna, apanharia um anel de ouro faltando uma pedra que rolara para um canto) perdia seu rubi e como o olho, que fora tão radiante, deixara de brilhar.

There was a bill that he would pay with a real two shilling piece, and it was real, all real, he assured himself, fingering the coin in his pocket, real to everyone except to him and to her; even to him it began to seem real; and then–but it was too exciting to stand and think any longer, and he pulled the parasol out of the earth with a jerk and was impatient to find the place where one had tea with other people, like other people.

Én, kezemben a jegyzetfüzetemmel, kifejezéseket gyártva, csupán a változásokat jegyeztem; árnyék-magam csak az árnyakat figyelte szorgalmasan. Hogyan folytassam utamat, mondtam, én nélkül, súlytalanul, látomások nélkül egy súlytalan és illúziók nélkül való világban?

Do you exist? Have I made you up?

And all the time Ralph was well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not represented in his dreams at all, so that when he met her he was bewildered by the fact that she had nothing to do with his dream of her. When