Quotes About Illusion

The whole idea of "connections" between language and reality is a false one.

In his many remarks on mathematics, Wittgenstein is concerned to show the delusiveness of this picture. For when we reflect on it, we forget that we are looking at a projection of our own decisions and their consequences.

Let them be fierce with you who have no experience of the difficulty with which error is discriminated from truth, and the way of life is found amid the illusions of the world.

success does not mean you cannot be tricked.

measure up - disillusion us by showing

The lie, of course, is more interesting.

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

I'll tell you what's wrong with dumb-shit patriotism--it's delusional! It signifies nothing but the American need to win

There's nothing so confusing as finding out that you don't know someone you thought you knew.

That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible.

Wilbur Larch knew that freedom was an orphan's most dangerous illusion, and when he finally heard from Homer, he scanned the oddly formal letter, which was disappointing in its lack of detail. Regarding illusions, and all the rest, there was simply no evidence. 'I am learning to swim,' wrote Homer Wells. (I know! I know! Tell me about it! Thought Wilbur Larch.) 'I do better at driving,' Homer added.

Lemties ne?manoma ?žvelgti, nebent jei sapnuoji ar esi apsvaig?s iš meil?s.

According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course.

They were members of Maine's very small money class. Their business, as they ridiculously called it, didn't make a cent, but they didn't need to make money; they were born rich. Their needless enterprise consisted of taking people to the wilderness and creating for them the sensation that they were lost there; they also took people shooting down rapids in frail rafts or canoes, creating for them the sensation that they would surely be bashed to death before they drowned.

But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That's what happens, like it or not.

We did not realize that there were forces beyond our play. Now I know they were the forces that contributed to our illusion of Owen's weightlessness; they were the forces we didn't have the faith to feel, they were the forces we failed to believe in—and they were also lifting up Owen Meany, taking him out of our hands. O God—please give him back! I shall keep asking You.

That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all—even on a sunny Indian summer day—it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible.

living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently." I

for had the boy seen what Lindberg meant by a personalized version of Alice's Rose of Jericho, he might have realized that there were other things that were not as they seemed.

Vienna, Garp thought, was a cadaver; all Europe, maybe, was a dressed-up corpse in an open coffin.

Things often are as they appear.

Nothing draws us closer to one another than the degree to which we face our deepest shame openly in one another's company. Coleridge and Wordsworth dreaded such self-exposure; we adore it. What we want is to feel known, warts and all—the more warts, the better. It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are.

What was true was what was believed, and what was believed was true. And when the bubbles burst, what had once been believed and was therefore true was no longer believed and therefore no longer true. The

Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself.