Illusion Quotes - Page 14

• A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.

  Tom Robbins

  Spring, Real, Book

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”, p.121, Bantam

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• The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Bullying, Reality, Views

  "Between Time and Timbuktu". Movie script by Kurt Vonnegut et al. Preface, 1972.

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• You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.

  Libba Bray

  Believe, Successful, People

  Libba Bray (2009). “The Sweet Far Thing”, p.330, Simon and Schuster

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• She was wearing the same clothes, but now she looked haggard and dirty. The delicate illusions that get us through life can only stand so much strain.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Dirty, Clothes, Haggard

  Hunter S. Thompson (1999). “The Rum Diary: A Novel”, p.169, Simon and Schuster

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• The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

  Frank Zappa

  Wall, Moving, Tables And Chairs

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• For ever and ever, we say when we are young, or in our prayers. Twice, we say it. Old One, do we not? For ever and ever ... so that a thing may be for ever, a life or a love or a quest, and yet begin again, and be for ever just as before. And any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion. For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time.

  Susan Cooper

  Prayer, Doe, Quests

  Susan Cooper (2010). “Silver on the Tree”, p.190, Simon and Schuster

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• The human phenomenon is but the sum Of densely coiled layers of illusion Each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity That there are persons of any kind When all there can be is mindless mirrors Laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream

  Thomas Ligotti

  Dream, Mirrors, Wind

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• Stories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.

  John Hodgman

  Pain, Blessed, People

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• But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?

  Nick Hornby

  Powerful, Creating, Years

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• Everything is an illusion; that is the whole thing about it - illusion, immitation, a mirage. It makes me too sad. Its having like a good dream, you know you are going to wake up.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Dream, Wake Up, Mirages

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• How does it feel? I feels exactly like one of those dreams in which you suddenly realize that you have to take a test you haven't studied for and you aren't wearing any clothes. And you've left your wallet at home. When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true.

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Running, Dream, Children

  Audrey Niffenegger (2014). “The Time Traveler's Wife”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

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• I've made a profound transformation. I've fashioned some cyber-underwear. I'm not scared of anything! Actually, I am scared of a few things. Cyber world is a world of adventure, a new galaxy. I'm big on adventure. But I don't assume that just because the word cyber is being used as a prefix, doesn't give it anymore value or credence. Cyber relationships have the illusion of intimacy, sometimes with the absence of intimacy. Is it better to have a conversation in a café or on the telephone?

  Tom Waits

  Adventure, Giving, Profound

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• On the meridian of time, there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.

  Henry Miller

  Time, Drama, Creating

  Henry Miller, John Calder (1985). “A Henry Miller reader”, Riverrun Pr

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• Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.

  J. G. Ballard

  Reality, Numbers, Forget

  "The Benign Catastrophist". Interview with Susie Mackenzie, www.theguardian.com. September 06, 2003.

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• An idyllic childhood is probably illusion.

  Martha Grimes

  Childhood, Idyllic

  Martha Grimes (1999). “The Lamorna Wink: A Richard Jury Mystery”

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• Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on it's pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Elude Us, Knowing, Attention

  A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

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• Soul mates' are fiction and an illusion; and while every young man and young woman will seek with all diligence and prayerfulness to find a mate with whom life can be most compatible and beautiful, yet it is certain that almost any good man and any good woman can have happiness and a successful marriage if both are willing to pay the price.

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Marriage, Beautiful, Successful

  Spencer W. Kimball (1982). “The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, Twelfth President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”

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• And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Mistake, Flower, Past

  Khaled Hosseini (2009). “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, p.161, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left.

  Amy Tan

  Hands, Magic, Fiction

  Amy Tan (2005). “Saving Fish from Drowning”, p.114, Penguin

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• People in general attach too much importance to words. They are under the illusion that talking effects great results. As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument. They but dimly represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind. When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.

  Theodore Dreiser

  Lying, Heart, Talking

  Theodore Dreiser (2004). “Sister Carrie”, p.83, Courier Corporation

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• How could they say that they truly loved each other? They had simply grown up together, been children together, and the proximity of it, the closeness of it, had produced in them love s illusion. And yet - on the other hand - what was love if it wasn't this instinct she felt.

  David Guterson

  Children, Hands, Together

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• Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

  Henry James

  Dream, Strong, Believe

  Henry James (2016). “The Daily Henry James: A Year of Quotes from the Work of the Master”, p.4, University of Chicago Press

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• I called the world of phenomena an illusion, I called my eyes and my tongue an accident, valueless phenomena. No, that is all over; I have awakened, I have really awakened and I have just been born today.

  Hermann Hesse

  Eye, World, Today

  "Siddhartha".

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• Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.

  Joseph Conrad

  Book, Ambition, Men

  1905 'Books'.

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• But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.

  Joan Didion

  Dog, Men, Vanity

  Joan Didion (1968). “Slouching towards Bethlehem”

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