Quotes About Illusion

Beware actors who can be anyone they wish to be; they are in fact no one at all, cold and empty, though they can be pied pipers to the masses.

No one could make a fool of himself in dying, regardless of his delusions; life was the stage for fools, and no one earned mockery by going to his grave.

Our illusion is that we travel through life on a calculated and straight trajectory, from the past through present into future, on a journey to understanding, truth, reward. But by Brownian movement we progress, sent angling off this way and that by the impact of everyone we meet and every event that we cannot foresee.

They were stories of things that had never happened and could never happen, but she told them with such quiet verve and conviction that we believed them and wanted to continue believing even after time robbed us of our sense of wonder.

fata morgana

utopias always turn out to be one version of hell or another.

but that tenderness is a vain form of pity

Sometimes I wondered if I had everything backward, my life and purpose and meaning all backward. Maybe the best thing I had to offer was fry cookery of a high order, and maybe my paranormal abilities were nothing more than the equivalent of a talent for farting on command, better repressed than indulged. I, no less than anyone, was capable of self-delusion, of pride that led me to embrace a grander image of myself than was the truth.

So many were swept away by boldfaced lies and swayed into currents of vicious fantasies, until they were so far from the shore of truth that they couldn't even see it.

Dorian Purcell

they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion

until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad.

Easy hope was usually false hope.

These days, "science" is often nothing more than a cover story.

It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized. I Ching, Hexagram 5, Hsü, Waiting (Nourishment)

he was living in a dream world, then he never wanted to wake up.

Engullimos de un sorbo la mentira que nos adula y bebemos gota a gota la verdad que nos amarga.

Maybe, when you hear the name Beverly, you think of Beverly Hills--people wandering the streets with their heads shot off by money.

All night the dreamer travels in this region and doesn't realize he's asleep. The differences between the logic of that world and the logic of this waking one are vast. But they feel the same. And isn't that how we recognize logic, by the way it feels?

To find the people who've became truly sane, seek among those who've managed to do without sanity.

His eyeballs look like he bought them in a joke shop.

The woman hurt me. She looked so soft and perfect, like a mannequin made of flesh, flesh all the way through.

But every time I entered the place there were veiled faces promising everything and then clarifying quickly into the dull, the usual, looking up at me and making the same mistake.

It had occurred to Sean once - on a bender about ten years before with some buddies, Sean and a bloodstream full of bourbon turning philosophical - that maybe they HAD gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state. That all three of them were, in reality, still eleven-year-old boys trapped in some cellar, imagining what they'd become if they ever escaped and grew up.