Quotes About Illusion

Lust is like a robin attacking his reflection in a pane of glass again and again.

Don't expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.

at that time she had not yet seen that the horizon was an illusion and

Never tell the truth about an amateur show.

Experience itself is convention and we are outside of experience.

The line between reality and illusion is getting blurry. Sometimes I really do think everyone hates me. Sometimes the crazy is all I've got. My head's pounding again. I hate all this: the pathology and the defiance and the confusion about whether I'm getting better or worse. And yet it is so totally me. I know that none of it ends here tonight. Not by a long shot.

With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is "in principle" an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself.

I saw a robin redbreast in Central Park today, but it turned out to be a sparrow with an exit wound.

I like Halloween. It gives you a chance to dress up like something you're not, you know? Like when the Miami Dolphins put on football uniforms.

We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.

And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her parents asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to.

More lies. But what could you do? That's how you roll when you're a teenage magician!

Guy lives in a fantasy world without junk food or cars or trans fats or TV and he's still fat. You had to admire his dedication to the cause.

a silver statue of a bird that seemed to be twitching. "Poor little thing," he said, petting it with his large hands. "Someone tried to change it into a real bird, but it got stuck in between. It thinks it's alive, but it's much too heavy to fly." The metal bird cheeped feebly, a dry, clicking noise like an empty pistol. Fogg sighed and put it away in a drawer. "It's always launching itself out of windows and landing in the hedges.

He's so happy," Eliot said dryly. "It's like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook.

That was the truth. And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her family asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to.

Your magician self, that loopy doppelgänger, was always with you, tugging at your sleeve, whispering silently that your real life was a fake life, a crude and undignified and inauthentic charade that nobody was really buying anyway.

He'd spent too long being disappointed by the world—he'd spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn't the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was. He wasn't going to be suckered in just like that. It was like finding a clue that somebody you'd buried and mourned wasn't really dead after all.

Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.

That's how you roll when you're a secret teenage magician

You know what Arthur C. Clarke said about technology and magic, right? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

But you could tell she was bursting with some terrible secret. And she had those things that one likes about magicians: she was disgustingly bright and rather sad and slightly askew. To tell you the truth I think one of the things we liked about her was that she reminded us of you.

cash was like a magic all its own: a way of turning one thing into another thing, producing something out of nothing, and he worked that magic all over town.

Two-thirds of his collarbone, and most of his right shoulder and biceps, now appeared to be composed of a smooth, highly polished fruitwood