Quotes About Illusion

A lot of the characters I play seem to be lying to themselves in some way. They maybe present themselves as confident or good at something, but in reality, it's clear that they don't know what they're talking about.

I really don't believe in magic.

In circuses, there is a lot of magic. Things become other things.

I don't like magic.

You want there to be some magical answer that will just make everything clear and easy to understand, and that's just not the way love works.

I'm doing everything I can to take the magician out of the equation of magic.

There is no magic. There are only magicians.

I was always interested in enchantment and magicians and still am.

Great liars are also great magicians.

Acting is make-believe. I never believe I'm the character; I want you to believe.

That's what acting is: really make-believe.

In addition, Master Twinkle seems convinced that someone is denying him a pair of stripey trousers.

Alas, poor Yorick! he said. She heard mermaids, so it follows that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. I have caught an everlasting cold, but luckily I am terribly dishonest. I cling to that.

By this time, half the people in High Norland were gathered in Royal Square to stare at the castle. They all watched with disbelief as the castle rose slightly into the air and glided toward the road that led southward. It was hardly more than an alley, really. It'll never fit! people said. But the castle somehow squeezed itself narrow enough to drift away along it and out of sight. The citizens of High Norland gave it a cheer as it went.

His bedroom door did escape him. "What a lie that was!" Howl remarked as he walked into the wall. "My shining dishonesty will be the salvation of me." He walked into the wall several times more, in several different places, before he discovered his bedroom door and crashed his way through it. Sophie could hear him falling about, saying that his bed was dodging.

Then the geese replaced themselves with six pigs and vanished.

Sophie got herself to the mirror, and found that she had to hobble. The face in the mirror was quite calm, because it was what she expected to see. It was the face of a gaunt old woman, withered and brownish, surrounded by wispy white hair. Her own eyes, yellow and watery, stared out at her, looking rather tragic. Don't worry, old thing, Sophie said to the face. You look quite healthy. Besides, this is much more like you really are.

He was standing holding the door to the stairs open with an arm that was entirely hidden inside an immense blue-and-silver sleeve. His feet, on the bottom stair, were standing inside the top half of a gigantic blue-and-silver jacket. Howl's other arm did not come anywhere near the other huge sleeve. Sophie could see that arm in outline, making bulging gestures under a vast frill of collar. Behind Howl, the stairs were full of blue-and-silver suit trailing back all the way to his bedroom.

He is real, in his own way, Ann pointed out. After all, what's real? How do you know I'm real, or if you are?

I think it was then that it dawned on me that Mum wasn't going to notice Chris was missing. She has been made so that she thinks Chris is just round the corner all the time. She doesn't realise that she never sees him. I don't know why I didn't understand earlier. If Aunt Maria can turn Chris into a wolf, she's surely strong enough to do this to Mum- except that it seems a different kind of thing, much more natural and ordinary, and I didn't really think she could do both kinds.

A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.

If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.

It's just that I've learned that somebody's appearance doesn't always match what's going on inside him. You can't look at a guy's face and see his demons. - Travis from The Good Father