Quotes About Illusion

To construct mechanically the brain of a somniferous tale, it is not enough to dissect nonsense & mightily stupefy the reader's intelligence with renowned doses, so as to paralyze his faculties for the rest of his life by the infallible law of fatigue; one must, besides, with good mesmeric fluid, make it somnambulistically impossible for him to move, against his nature forcing his eyes to cloud over at your own fixed stare.

When all else fails there's always delusion.

Las Vegas is a very strange place. It's a place of broken dreams.

The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.

When I think that I've mastered the game, it appears that every time I discover that I was playing blindly on some larger board.

Fools and gold go along with each other

Objectivity has about as much substance as the emperor's new clothes.

Time is a dream ... a destroying dream; it lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas; it covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.

Love is for fools and dreamers, who don't know better.

Morning Sea Let me stop right here. Let me, too, have a look at nature: the morning sea and the cloudless sky, both a luminous blue, the yellow shore, all of it beautiful, and in such magnificent light. Let me stop right here. Let me pretend this is actually what I'm seeing (I really did see it, when I first stopped) and not, here too, more of those fantasies of mine, more of those memories, those voluptuous illusions.

The subjectivity of human thought wants to be objective, but objectivity presents itself as subjectivity to subjectivity, which fools human thought into believing it is objective.

It just goes to show. There's ten people in the world and the rest is ghosts and mirrors.

Babette looked too good for the place tonight, but then goodness is only relative after all ("Steps Going Up" aka "Guillotine" aka "Men Must Die")

The sightseers would have been disappointed, as the real thing always makes a poorer show than the fake. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

We don't marry women, he thought; we marry angels, and in this moment or two of the marriage act, the scales fall from our eyes and we see them as they really are, perhaps never to glimpse it again. How lovely she is, how unearthly lovely.

And what is love anyway but the unattainable, the reaching out toward an illusion?

When someone says that their love will never die, it means that they love is not real, for everything that is real dies.

But one jailer had heard that Houdini was coming, and the jailer was ready. When Houdini closed the cell door, the jailer put the key in the lock and secretly turned it in the wrong direction. He then removed the key, and everyone watched as Houdini struggled to escape—by unknowingly locking himself in repeatedly. Finally, in frustration, Houdini admitted he could not escape. The jailer then revealed his deception. Houdini had believed a lie, and the lie had held him captive.

One works hard to prop up an illusion that sucks the life out of them, and the other works hard to make their home a place that restores them, nurtures them, and gives life to others.

As he began to drift again Jean was never sure whether he saw or did not see, a troupe of monkeys clad in blue Hussar coats piped with yellow twist, enter from a small door to swing across the great chamber and exit like nomadic wanderers into a great door emblazoned by the setting sun.

Thinking you're not in trouble and not being in trouble are two different things.

trust is like a broken mirror, you may still see yourself, but you can never dismiss the crack.

there's a goodlookin' woman behind every tree . . ." He joined me for the rest. "There just ain't any trees.

We do everything we can to protect the people we love, whatever it takes, and it's not enough. Unlike bone, once that illusionary magic circle is broken, it can never be completely repaired, and it is not stronger at the break.