Quotes About Illusion

What has changed? Is he different because I have forced him to be? Is it because he is away from Balekin? Or is he no different at all and I am only seeing what I want to see?

I knew what he was, I try to tell myself. I saw the blood crusted on his red cap. If I let myself forget, then more fool me

They do not need to deceive humans. Humans will deceive themselves.

Fear is not love, but it can appear much the same. So too, power.

I look pretty. The kind of pretty that allows monsters to deceive people into forests, into dances where they will find their doom.

It turns out that men have more authority, even when they're not real.

The easiest lies to tell are the ones you want to be true.

Aaron looks like a con man who got hit with a shrink ray and you look like you're going to Catholic school.

I had come to discover that "safe" was an illusion, a pretense that adults wrapped around their children- and sometimes themselves- to make the world seem comfortable. I had discovered that under that thin cover of let's-pretend, monsters and nightmares lay, and that not all of them came from places like the moonroads or the nightling cities. Some of the monsters were people we knew. People we thought we could trust.

Thus she spoke; and I longed to embrace my dead mother's ghost. Thrice I tried to clasp her image, and thrice it slipped through my hands, like a shadow, like a dream.

Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections for their daydreams, and put their trust in him.

Affreuse condition de l'homme ! Il n'y a pas un de ses bonheurs qui ne vienne d'une ignorance quelconque.

Ça se croit grand parce que ça fait de petites choses avec de grands capitaux.

La ilusión es una memoria convertida en deseo.

I begin to perceive," said La Briere, smiling, "that there is something poisonous in glory, as there is in certain dazzling flowers.

Chuang Tzu in dream became a butterfly, And the butterfly became Chuang Tzu at waking. Which was the real - the butterfly or the man ? Who can tell the end of the endless changes of things? The water that flows into the depth of the distant sea Returns in time to the shallows of a transparent stream. The man, raising melons outside the green gate of the city, Was once the Prince of the East Hill. So must rank and riches vanish. You know it, still you toil and toil - what for?

But maybe every life looked wonderful if all you saw was the photo albums.

If she packaged the perfect Facebook life, maybe she would start to believe it herself.

When you were young you talked about 'falling in love' with such amusing gravity, as if it were an actual recordable event, when what was it really? Chemicals. Hormones. A trick of the mind.

The house was literally perfect now. Instead of being thrilling, that suddenly seemed depressing.

But maybe every life looked wonderful if all you saw was the photo albums. People always obediently smiled and tilted their heads when a camera was put in front of them. Perhaps seconds after the shutter clicked, she and Nick sprang apart, avoiding each other's eyes, their smiles replaced by snarls. She

I think I'm falling for a red herring here,

She'd looked at the stubble along his jawline, and the thought had crossed her mind: He looks like Clark Kent, but maybe he's really Superman.

Mum used to say that when she met my dad it was like a perfect love story. I thought Patrick was my perfect love story. Except he's not. He's the hypnotist's love story. I'm the ex-girlfriend in the hypnotist's love story. Not the heroine. I'm only a minor character.