Quotes About Illusion

Everything exists, real or unreal. The truth is only a matter of perspective.

A lot of perception is a con job.

Und was ist deine Meinung?' wiederholte der Mann. Dallow kniff die Augen leicht zusammen und sagt rasch ohne weiter zu überlegen: 'Ein Lichtspiel. Die Welt ist ein Lichtspiel.' ('And what is your opinion?' the man repeated. Dallow slightly squinted his eyes and said quickly without contemplating any further: 'A play of lights. The world is a play of lights.')

Here's the thing: we're all as thin as paper. Like those paper people you used to find in old children's magazines, inhabiting a two-page spread with other paper people, all of them hanging out somewhere together-at the park, at church, at school, at the mall, on the family room-until some kid took a pair of scissors to the dotted lines surrounding them and cut them out of their paper world. That's us, that's anyone. That was me. A cut-out paper person removed from the world I once belonged to.

Philip K. Dick could have been Japanese. He seemed to know a lot about how the world is never what it looks like. That's pretty much Japan through and through.

The hand doesn't need to be quicker than the eye if the eye is looking in the wrong place. Everything the magician does is about misleading the audience, everything: how he stands, where he looks, where he points and especially what he says. He will never be doing what he says he is doing, and if he tells you what he's about to do, he's lying.

Hay mucha gente para quien la cultura es la cosa más seria, el medio que ilumina el alma y constituye la salvación; algo con lo que no se debe jugar. Pero la cultura y el arte son las primeras víctimas de esa ilusión, pues pone sobre ellos una carga que no puede llevar.

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

You let the fairies fox you while the devil Does you.

Thais have a saying about a frog living inside a coconut shell. The frog believes that the world inside the shell is the whole universe. In the private investigation business, Vincent Calvino had clients who like the frog. What they saw from inside their shell blinded them, made them unable to solve a problem. So they hired Calvino. He knew the drill. Shells offered comfort and security. Leaving could be a dangerous business.

The dream dissipated like smoke, and she tried so hard to hold it inside her heart and her memory, but like all dreams, it had never been meant to keep.

I always say beauty is only sin deep.

Journalists cover words and delude themselves into thinking they have committed journalism.

Noch sind wir in der tiefsten Tiefe nicht korrupt genug, um Schein und Sein, Außen und Innen unwillkürlich bei jeder Auffassung getrennt zu halten, so daß wir, wenn sich uns eine Fassade zeigt, wirklich nur eine Fassade und nicht mehr annehmen würden. Die Wahrnehmung des Menschen ist produktiv und ergänzend.

Kunst ist dazu da, die Wirklichkeit zu verhindern...

He was not a realist, and I wasn't either, and we both knew that the others in all their triteness were realists, stupid as puppets which touch their collars a thousand times without ever discovering the string they are dangling on.

Oh, what lies there are in kisses!

Before the war I often had the impression of being in the household of a busy architect and building tycoon rather than the Führer and Reich Chancellor.

Her words were like tinfoil; they shone and they covered things up.

Sometimes the world is too convincing, as if someone spent too much time on it.

Reflected, framed, the room had charms foreign to the original, just as an ordinary or even ugly object gains beauty and dignity when painted or photographed.

It does not matter what happens now. There is no world: it has fallen away from us.

We keep stuff in order to hang on to what's important, but it's an illusion ... These objects are not bridges to the past, they're bridges to memories of the past. But they are not the past.

O sweet, delusive Noon, Which the morning climbs to find, O moment sped too soon, And morning left behind.