Quotes About Illusion

it's that we don't know half of what we think we do. And we know ourselves least of all.

I look around at the curl of clouds in the sky, the sun glittering on the ocean in the distance. A picture postcard. Just a few hundred miles away this virus is killing people so fast that they don't have room for bodies, but you would never know it from where I stand.

gente se ha inventado todo tipo de formas de hacer que las cosas parezcan diferentes de lo que son en realidad. Una habitación puede sumirse en una noche artificial. El Botox transforma los rostros de las personas en algo que no son. El TiVo te hace creer que eres capaz de congelar el tiempo, o al menos de reordenarlo a tu antojo.

Driving home, I am struck by the sudden thought that the world is inflatable, trees and grass and houses ready to collapse with the single prick of a pin. I have the sense that if I veer the car to the left, smash through the picket fence and the little Tykes playground, it will bounce us back like a rubber bumper.

Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow – beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.

Think of it as a parallel universe. But maybe it's the real one, and we're in a dream.

Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there … the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

gave it the illusion of being there … the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

Most people had no idea there was only a thin veneer between their comfortable lives and the end of civilization as they knew it.

Sweetbread is not sweet and it's not bread.

A writer worth his salt is not going to write about how damned lovely it is; it isn't, that's why so many people tell themselves it is [lovely].

In Virginia... all geese are swans.

The room I entered was a dream of this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers, something is hushed up. We had macaroni for lunch every day except Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.

We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. That first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two spent cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing.

There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not anymore. Now I'm startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Halloween mask made of sagging, pinkish- grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head.

When you have once seen the chaos, you must make some thing to set between yourself and that terrible sight; and so you make a mirror, thinking that it shall be reflected the reality of the world; but then you understand that the mirror reflects only appearances, and that reality is somewhere else, off behind the mirror; and then you remember that behind the mirror there is only the chaos.

The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.

The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived.

And anyway, who's to say that what we see when we're drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria

She trained her camera on a fresh-faced hopeful but the pictures she produced were the mug-shots of a raddled old confidence trickster. Exposed, yes, that is the word

I was estranged from myself and all that I had once supposed I was. My life up to now had only the weightless density of a dream. When I thought about my past it was like thinking of what someone else had been, someone I had never met but whose history I knew by heart. It all seemed no more than a vivid fiction.

For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion .