Quotes About Illusion

Vedi? Il denaro non lo puoi rovesciare: comunque lo giri ti mostra sempre una faccia.

God allows us to experience fear at times to help us recognize our false foundations, things on which we are resting our security that have no more strength to support us than a mound of whipped cream.

The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real. Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him.

Under all this dirt the floor is really very clean." Lydia Davis

a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him.

Beyond the hand holding this book that I'm reading, I see another hand lying idle and slightly out of focus—my extra hand.

I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.

Under all this dirt the floor is really very clean.

Although she didn't have the plumbing, she deluded herself that she was the modern W.C. (about Margaret Thatcher, M.T.)

[Beauty is] a delicate bait with a deadly hook; a sweet panther with a devouring paunch, a sour poison in a silver pot.

Did you ever consider the difference between a real flower and a wax imitation? The latter may be quite as beautiful. It may deceive you at first. And yet when you discover the deception you are disappointed. "The lack of fragrance," Jennie suggests. No! the flower may be odorless. It is the lack of life. I do not know what there is in that mystic life that should make such a difference. But I am sure that the charm of the flower is in its life.

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was cracked in a double sense -- it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream.

You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you're not. That'd be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the 'hello' is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya?

something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.

Le spine della rosa sono nacoste dal fiore: the thorns of the rose are hidden by the bloom.

faces that it was.

The site looks unpromising from a distance, blending in with the surrounding sepia-toned hills, but I'm learning that looks can be deceiving.

Love is like candy floss. you crave it and it looks very promising, but if you try to satisfy your hunger with it, there is nothing. Only a sweet aftertaste - if you're lucky.

How could a woman who was that beautiful, who smelled that good, who had such perfectly lovely teeth and bright eyes, be so thoroughly, completely, entirely, stark raving mad?" ~ Robert Cameron

Then he saw Catty. He hadn't recognized her at first. She had painted her face white for the day and drawn black caverns around her eyes. Squares over her lips made skeleton teeth. Children circled her, watching her paint a little girl's face.

Maybe hallucinations are just another reality that we don't see most of the time

Things aren't always as they seem. But then, sometimes they're exactly as they seem.

We create space and time on the surface of our retinas.