Quotes About Illusion

If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.

Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way. I know as well as the next person that there is considerable transcendent value in a river running wild and undammed, a river running free over granite, but I have also lived beneath such a river when it was running in flood, and gone without showers when it was running dry.

There could be no snake in Quntana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.

Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.

Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else. I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not.

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely . . . by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. –Joan Didion

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.

The images would flash at Maria like slides in a dark room. On film they might have seemed a family.

In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin.

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which.

It is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.

Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder.

Perhaps the mirror in Sally's dressing room had waved the wrong way and caused her to look larger than she actually was. And perhaps all that skipping had jumbled her brain and affected her ability to separate reality from wishful thinking.

Fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie.

From a certain height, everyone looks the same - men, women, villains, kings - as if rank and fortune were simply an accident of perspective.

It all begins so hopefully, but these Worlds we build for ourselves are all just castles in the sand, waiting for the evening tide.

Like all other acts of creation, magic is just a state of mind

Nada tenho que ver com a ciência; mas, se tantos homens em quem supomos juízo são reclusos por dementes, quem nos afirma que o alienado não é o alienista?

When we're awake, we see what we need to see. When we're asleep, we see what is really there.

Lie to yourself until it's true.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.