Quotes About Illusion

Somehow I'd hoped that this would be the summer that I would discover that I was alive. The world my mom and dad said was out there waiting for me. That world doesn't actually exist.

Ari believed we are all a simulation. Matter is an illusion. Everything is silicon. He could be right. But your emotions? They're solid.

She wondered how many Dans there were in the world, dreaming of things they would hate if they actually got them. And how many were pushing people into their delusional idea of happiness?

the mind-boggling bit is that the theory hints that the entire universe is just two-dimensional information on a cosmological horizon and that everything we think we see in three dimensions is really as much an illusion as a 3D movie, and it could all be a simulation. So really, the world (and everything) might be flat after all. And then again it might not be.)

A picture of a pipe is not a pipe, as Magritte told us. There is a permanent gap between the signifier and the thing signified. An online profile of your best friend is not your best friend. A status update about a day in the park is not a day in the park. And the desire to tell the world about how happy you are is not how happy you are.

Newton dragging me forward until we reached a large stretch of grass. This is what dogs liked to do, I discovered. They liked tout, I had to admit, it worked for them, and for Newton in particular. It was a collective illusion they had chosen to swallow and they were submitting to it wholeheartedly, without any nostalgia for their former wolf selves.

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective. (…) It's not what you look at; it's what you see.

So anyway, the mind-boggling bit is that the theory hints that the entire universe is just two-dimensional information on a cosmological horizon and that everything we think we see in three dimensions is really as much an illusion as a 3D movie, and it could all be a simulation.

this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish." —James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective

if you see magic often enough it starts to look normal.

What was reality? An objective truth? A collective illusion? A majority opinion? The product of historical understanding? A bream?

La facultate, prietenii nostri ne-au considerat mereu un cuplu fericit. Si chiar eram. Mai putin in cealalta jumatate a timpului in care eram un cuplu nefericit.

You made love to a dream. Have I ever lied to you, George? Then remember what I told you: Whoever you love will be just like me. Any woman seen through love's eyes is as perfect as you thought me to be." "No," George said. "There's no one like you." "They're all like me, George, if you see with your heart. But some of them stay.

The civil rights movement ended in a kind of negotiated compromise. Black Americans were granted legal equality, while white America was allowed to nurture and maintain an illusion of innocence, even as it continued to live in almost complete separation.

TV is the ultimate leveling phenomenon. It makes everyone, rich and poor, equally incapable of dealing with reality. That

In fact, the tension between the sheer quantity of horrifying news and your real-world impotence to do much about it is part of our consumer strategy. We create the illusion that being informed is a kind of action in itself. So to wash that guilt out—to eliminate the shame and discomfort you feel over doing nothing as the world goes mad—you'll keep tuning in.

Listening in anger to your favorite political program, you will act like a person who is shaking a fist at power, when in fact you've been neutralized as an independent threat, reduced to a prop in a show.

but the real shock this past year was finding out how frail has been our illusion of stability all along. We were a shallow country, held together by stale rituals and muscle memory. And now it is a shallow man who will take us wherever he pleases.

There are times when American politics seems like little more than two groups in a fever to prevent each other from trespassing upon their respective soothing versions of unreality

It is last stage of all When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.

We count the hours: these dreams of ours, false and hollow, Shall we go hence and find they are not dead?

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.