Quotes About Illusion

To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

when people are expecting to see nothing that is usually what they see.

The tears I gratified him with were fake ones. Ones that set off my green eyes the way diamonds set off emeralds. And it worked. If you dazzled a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won't notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him. – Vida Winters Page 268

I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?

They think I am concealing my ugliness from them, when in truth it is their ugliness I am hiding.

I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuader ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?

disregarded, by the wayside. It never failed. A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

remembered the words of the man in the brown suit, and how they had echoed around the rafters of my rooms under the eaves. Yet the man in the brown suit was a figment of her imagination. I should have expected it. She was a spinner of yarns, wasn't she? A storyteller. A fabulist. A liar. And the plea that had so moved me—Tell me the truth—had been uttered by a man who was not even real. I was at a loss to explain to myself the bitterness of my disappointment.

copper curls turned. I was stunned. The glasses were gone. Green eyes, bright as glass and as real

mask of white makeup and the exotic draperies.

If you dazzle a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won't notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him.

Obama's "generosity" is a fraud: he is bestowing on young people money that is actually their own.

but it is always dreadful when the pictures in front of one's eyes become meaningless and the real word is there instead and seems meaningless, too.

Things you let yourself imagine happening, never do happen.

The time of our delusion does not obstruct the time of our realization. Our practice is not in order to attain realization. Practice itself is the actualization of realization.

That the self advances and confirms the myriad things is called delusion. That the myriad things advance and confirm the self is enlightenment.

Yes, but negative is an illusion. Negative and positive are both construction material. Negative is evolutionary catalyst. D: But you know humans consider something negative as being bad. C: They should reword it to evolutionary catalyst. We have been given on purpose these catalysts for evolution. These things that appear negative... these things are on purpose.

Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear. Eric Packer about Vija Kinski

I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.

Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That's the nature of existence.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

I am the false character that follows the name around.