Quotes About Illusion

That's probably the biggest secret of acting: If the actor believes it themselves, they can make you believe it.

Anybody that believes that Adrian Grenier's name is really Vince should probably watch less TV.

Too often our unexamined and deluded story-lines become self-fulfilling prophecies. We can always marshal any evidence we want in support of a particular view, and then believe it even if it is patently not true. This is delusion.

One man's faith is another man's delusion. . . .

Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics, and others with a shaky hold on reality.

He drifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath escarpments of naked Precambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown mountains floated on eerie pools of mirage.

As I fought to catch my breath after moving past three climbers, the mask actually gave the illusion of asphyxiating me, so I tore it from my face—only to discover breathing was even harder without it.

We don't want obvious exploitation. We want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.

Bad liars always think they're good at it. (quoting Michael Moynihan)

It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy. "I

Fiction seemed all about harnessing infinity. In fiction, when you walk into a restaurant and you sit down, there's nobody there and the restaurant doesn't exist. The restaurant is a horrific, never-ending nothingness. So you make scattershot decisions about what the restaurant might look like and the person you might be sitting with.

I remember that Karl Marx line about religion being the opium of the people—his idea that the elites keep the masses subdued with illusory happiness.

Tony faking his brain going wrong was a sign that his brain had gone wrong.

like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.

frightening person pretending to be normal. Things

Because I live for coincidences. They briefly give to me the illusion or hope that there's a pattern to my life, and if there's a pattern, then maybe im moving toward some kind of destiny where it's all explained.

Great sleep dreams seduce and sometimes torture. The best ones can almost break our heart when we awaken from them and find ourselves back…here.

Language is a traitor, a double agent who sleeps across borders without warning in the dead of night. It is a heavy snowfall in a foreign country, which hides the shapes and contours of reality beneath a cloak of nebulous whiteness. It is a crippled dog, never quite able to perform the tricks we ask of it. It is a ginger biscuit, dunked for too long in the tea of our expectations, crumbling and dissolving into nothingness. It is a lost continent.

What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he'd figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.

To paraphrase Frank Zappa, she'd thought it was a man she wanted, but instead it was a muffin.

It occurred to her that the Perry in her head had been nothing but a sentimental projection, extrapolated from the little boy he'd been. She didn't know the real Perry any more than Russ knew the real her. "How

He knows how love blinds people to the truth about the one they are in love with.

Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mother's illusions.

the difference between him and her was her capacity for self-deception.