Quotes About Illusion

Dear, the man can't be eviscerated because he has no viscera. He's a walking colon. If you cut him open, you only end up covered in crap.

When he looked away from her, the bottles were gone and with them all the vertical and horizontal currents of water and brandy that represented the omnidirectional tides of time's ocean.

When my wits fail me, I resort to self-deception.

She was so nice to look at that Joe twice stabbed his left foot when he thought he was spearing a bit of litter, though neither wound was serious enough to require a tetanus shot.

What most people call truth is merely the surface, and under it lies a great depth of truth that they do not perceive.

eerie in a way it is nowhere else in the world, the flats receding and the low hills rising as if they are just fields of mist and walls of fog, illusions of shapes and dimensions, reflections of reflections, and those reflections only reflections of a dream.

The only monsters in this world are those who pass for human, who cast shadows and are reflected in mirrors, who smile and speak of compassion and shed convincing tears.

Once, when cornered by a pinwheel-eyed man who insisted that the mayor of Los Angeles was not human but a robot controlled by the audioanimatronics department at Disneyland, Joe had lowered his voice and said, with nervous sincerity, "Yes, we've known about that for years. But if we print a word of it, the people at Disney will kill us all." He had spoken with such conviction that the nutball had exploded backward and fled.

Words are plastic these days. Small loans made to desperate people at exorbitant interest rates are called payday advances. A cheesy hotel paired with a seedy casino is called a resort. Any assemblage of frenetic images, bad music, and incoherent plot is called a major motion picture.

When steel sagged, when clothes grew moth-eaten on haberdashery racks, when cars rusted on showroom floors for want of customers, the film industry nevertheless flourished. In bad times as in good, the only two absolute necessities were food and illusions.

She understood at least as well as I did what corruption and pitiless cruelty might be hidden behind the masks that some people wore.

Politics was an illusion of service that cloaked the corruption of power.

Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.

Casinos have no windows, no clocks. The masters of the games want their customers to forget the passage of time, to lay down just one more bet, and then one more.

The penitent face of the religieuse collapsed into the greedy hookworm maw, as though it ate its own false countenance

can't see anything inside, just vague shapes, which probably means the glass is heavily tinted and polarized, so it looks clear from inside but not from out here

THE WORLD HAS GONE MAD. YOU MIGHT have argued against that contention twenty years ago, but if you argue it in our time, you only prove that you, too, live in delusion.

Friendship is an illusion.. Like love and compassion!

full of classes he has never taken, grades he never earned

Some believed the most ridiculous things without a shred of evidence, but wouldn't believe a truth even when it stuck its fingers in their eyes. So to speak.

Even though comfort based on an illusion is itself illusory, it is for a while a deliverance from the anxiety and existential dread that the world today can generate in abundance.

Watches and clocks measure our perception of time, not time itself.

When a majority of people in any society share the same array of illusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad. History is filled with chilling examples. Joe Smith knew it when he built this house.

In a world that daily disconnects further from truth, more and more people accept the virtual in place of the real, and all things virtual are also malleable.