Quotes About Illusion

Much of the tablecloth was a series of grey smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain.

Our plesance here is all vain glory,This false world is but transitory.

A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are.

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

He thinks he's all aces but he's mostly sevens and eights.

You always was a skinny child but turn sideways you just ain't there atall.

Addictions [...] started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were [...] less intelligent than goldfish.

By definition, any belief is something that sombody hopes is true; conversely, a disbelief is a hope that something is not true. Neither has anything whatever to do with the real truth, except to obscure it.

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?

Dost thou fill thy chest with dirt, and expect to find gold when thou openest it?

Her world must be flat because she disappeared all at once rather than a bit at a time.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us. —William H. Gass, "Mr. Gaddis and His Goddamn Books" (2006)

The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society—and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding.

Someone who remains satisfied with the superficial pleasures of life is ignorant of the agitation deep within the mind. He is under the illusion that he is a happy person, but his pleasures are not lasting, and the tensions generated in the unconscious keep increasing, to appear sooner or later at the conscious level of the mind. When they do, this so-called happy person becomes miserable. So why not start working here and now to avert that situation?

Life is the art of being well deceived.

There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our firends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please, that is, as they please or displease us.

There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our friends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please — that is as they please or displease us.

The world has been doing little else but playing at make-believe all its lifetime.

All along the avenue, cotton candy stands, fun houses, and games of chance were tightly shuttered, like clowns without makeup.