Quotes About Illusion

We live" writes Pursewarden somewhere, "lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time - not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.

See it was like this when we waltz into this place. A couple of papish cats is doing an Aztec two-step And I says Dad let's cut but then this dame comes up behind me see and says you and me could really exist Wow I says Only the next day she has bad teeth and really hates poetry.

It is as well to avoid illusions of control, but in the end all we can do is act as if we can influence events. To do otherwise is to succumb to fatalism.

But for ten minutes I'd been transported somewhere else. Andy's room. A world where toys lived. Had feelings. Had problems. I had no idea who was behind it all, but somewhere in this building there were magicians at work.

I have just bought into the delusion that these toys are real. And now I'm believing that this one toy, Buzz Lightyear, is himself delusional for not realizing he is just a toy. This was insane.

Yet how ordinary so many strange things turn out to be, like dreams that end up disappointing us by making sense.

While we read a novel, we are insane--bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.

Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

If he'd lived I might have married him and had a passel of brats and a dog. Who wants that happy ending?" "A lot of people." "It's bullshit." "Yes," she said. "I know.

Josh wanted to tell her what he knew: that love might look like a shore but turn out to be a desert island, where you roamed alone, talking to yourself, trying to crack open coconuts with your shoe. So thirsty you drank the salt water. So hungry you ate the sand.

a thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer then the truth

Memory is a great deceiver: it embroiders until naught is left but the glory and the pleasure.

We translated the basic Hindu teaching that everything is illusion into the modern neurological truth that everything is a figment of your own brain.

I thought that you had changed me, but it was just a trick. You sawing back and forth above my chest till I was cut in half, dark magician.

It's television, dear. Nobody expects it to be real, just convincing." Eve was about to tell her mom that her life is real, that her cases are real, that not everything on TV is scripted and performed, but then she thought about that press conference and realized she was wrong.

I'm not sure whether I'm losing my grip on reality," he said. "Or if reality is losing its grip on us.

He never was. It's the rest of us who are delusional," Ian said. "We blithely go through life pretending that we're anonymous, that nobody cares what we are doing, saying, reading, or thinking when we know that all the electronic devices we have are constantly spying on us but we tell ourselves they aren't.

Somehow he promised each of us a great romance, without a touch or a word. He was an accomplished tease.

The future ain't what it used to be - and what's more, it never was.

You can pretend that your life is going on when really, all along, you're trapped in a moment you'll never be able to change.

Social psychology stands at the intersection between our eyes and the world in front of us, and helps us understand the difference between what we think we see and what is actually out there.

We seem to experience time passing as a smooth flow of moments. Barbour insists that the passage of time is an illusion and that reality consists of nothing but a vast pile of moments, each a configuration of the whole universe. You now are experiencing a moment. Now you are experiencing a different moment. According to Barbour, both moments exist eternally and timelessly, in the pile of moments. Reality is nothing but this frozen collection of moments outside time.