Quotes About Illusion

Ramrod has an empire. They have not had it very long yet already it is shabby and disreputable. Everyday the faggots and their friends can see, hear, and feel Ramrod's empire disintegrating as the men lose more and more things they never owned in the first place.

Enlightenment, after all, is just one more bone. It's an idea we have.

Only the tourists really understand Cambridge, Wittgenstein says. Cambridge is only there to be photographed: that's what they grasp. Cambridge is a collective fantasy …

My bounce-around life had taught me that dreams were dangerous things -- they look solid in your mind, but you just try to reach for them. It's like gathering clouds.

if she'd learned nothing else over the past few years, she knew that things were not always as they appeared. Success and money had nothing to do with happiness. Hustle and bustle didn't mean better. And simple wasn't synonymous with boring.

Tened fe, mi buen amigo, y recordad que las cosas no son siempre lo que aparentan.

Y así es como le dices al mundo que las cosas no son siempre lo que parecen- concluyó el Ancestral-. Que hay humanos que parecen monstruos, y monstruos que parecen humanos;

Por cada lobo parlante que es un príncipe encantado hay por lo menos cien que son lobos de verdad. Y ni todo el amor del mundo es capaz de cambiar esa circunstancia.

Es lo que suele suceder con las personas y con los objetos más asombrosos -se dijo-. Nunca lo parecen a simple vista.

Y recuerda que los peores monstruos son aquellos que no lo parecen.

La Luna cambia, varía, se muestra y se oculta –asintió la Echadora de Cartas–. La Luna es engañosa. Ella es, en gran medida, la responsable del estado de confusión del Loco.

Los viejos tenemos el conocimiento -dijo Gaernon con amabilidad, ignorando a Kim-. Los adultos tienen la seguridad. Los niños tienen la ilusión. Pero sois los jóvenes los que teneís el poder para cambiar el mundo, Keyko. No lo olvides jamás.

Tal vez, de tanto fingir que era un fantasma, estaba transformándose poco a poco en un de ellos

When we think about fairy tales, we think about happily ever afters, forgetting the darkness that stories beginning with "once upon a time" so often contain. I tried to protect Shay from that darkness. But there was no way to shield her from the truth: Life is not a fairy tale.

The relationship itself was a croquette, too much flour and milk patted smooth into something it wasn't.

Scratch the surface, and there's just more surface—chalk dust under your nails, but not much else. What you see, as they say, is what you get.

Hidden in the works of a mysterious clock are her many deaths, and yet the whole world is piled up before her on a banquet table again today. The timer, broken.

It is some water lilies and a skull in a decorative pond, and a tiny goldfish swimming like an animated change-purse made of brightness and surprises observing the moment through its empty eye.

We attribute to ourselves qualities that we do not possess because if we possessed them, our lives would exactly mirror our image of ourselves. Our lies about what is really happening in our lives are what we use to "patch up" our ego with rationalizations and justifications, all of which conceal from us the fact that we cannot really do anything because we have no Being.

Is there anything sadder than losers telling themselves that they're fortunate?

His plan sounded dreamy—assuming we were a normal couple, headed out for a normal date, but we weren't that couple. We were a freak show of his own making.

once she had believed the world could become new again, that the right people in the right place could make up any rules they wanted. And none of this was true. They had all paid the price. And really, where was the moment that should have happened differently? Which was the choice that had set all the others in motion? And would a different choice have been the right one?

I can see how James or Greene might agree with this point of view: the former finds that the ugly old lamp no longer produces a genie when rubbed and the latter realizes he has nothing left to wish for.

You got to start thinking, and you've got to let go of the idea that you're something special to somebody, because none of us are, and if you don't, if you don't stop dreaming about that, you're going to end up all snap-snap-snapped to pieces.