Illusion Quotes - Page 15

• There are 500 reasons I write for children.... Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about the critics.... They don't read to free themselves of guilt, to quench their thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... They don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Children, Book, Believe

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• Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Thinking, Feet, Pavement

  Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.396, Faber & Faber

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• We're all travelling heavy with illusions.

  Sherman Alexie

  Heavy

  FaceBook post by Sherman Alexie from May 25, 2016

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• If life is an illusion it's a pretty painful one.

  Michel Houellebecq

  Life Is, Painful, Ifs

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• The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life...These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Unique, Zest, Self

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• Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

  George Eliot

  Beautiful, Struggle, Errors

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.2784, Delphi Classics

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• Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

  Tennessee Williams

  Truth, Opposites, Giving

  Tennessee Williams (1999). “The Glass Menagerie”, p.4, New Directions Publishing

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• ...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

  William Faulkner

  Men, Giving, Victory

  The Sound and the Fury pt. 2 (1929)

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• Are you the new person drawn toward me? To begin with, take warning - I am surely far different from what you suppose; Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal? Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover? Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction? Do you think I am trusty and faithful? Do you see no further than this façade—this smooth and tolerant manner of me? Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?

  Walt Whitman

  Real, Men, Thinking

  Walt Whitman (2013). “Leaves of Grass”, p.198, Simon and Schuster

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• The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

  Michael Chabon

  Fire, Dust, Broken

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• Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

  David Sedaris

  Writing, Giving, People

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• Reason is the illusion of reality

  Hazrat Inayat Khan

  Reality, Reason

  Hazrat Inayat Khan “The Sayings of Hazrat Inayat Khan”, Library of Alexandria

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• The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

  Tim O'Brien

  Inspirational, Dream, Memories

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.218, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man's dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: did I want to follow him?

  Primo Levi

  Gymnastics, Men, Creation Of Man

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• [Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

  Julian Barnes

  Hate, Stupid, Moving

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• Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.

  Hermann Hesse

  Buddhist, Yoga, Men

  Hermann Hesse (2013). “Steppenwolf: A Novel”, p.60, Macmillan

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• Though men in the mass forget the origins of their need, they still bring wolfhounds into city apartments, where dog and man both sit brooding in wistful discomfort. The magic that gleams an instant between Argos and Odysseus is both the recognition of diversity and the need for affection across the illusions of form. It is nature's cry to homeless, far-wandering, insatiable man: "Do not forget your brethren, nor the green wood from which you sprang. To do so is to invite disaster.

  Loren Eiseley

  Dog, Men, Cities

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• Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Horse, Men, Said

  Cormac McCarthy (2012). “All the Pretty Horses”, p.115, Pan Macmillan

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• You’ll join me sooner than you know in a place with . . . no illusions, where the truth is the only architecture, the only color, the only sound--where that which we sense merely on occasion, and which takes us up and gives us the rare and beautiful glimpses of the things we truly love, flows in deep rivers and tumbles about like clouds in the sky.

  Mark Helprin

  Beautiful, Clouds, Color

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• The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.

  Sigmund Freud

  Life, Giving Up, Pain

  Sigmund Freud, Peter (AFT) Gay, Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Civilization and Its Discontents”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.

  David Guterson

  Life, Summer, Real

  David Guterson (2009). “Snow Falling on Cedars”, p.105, A&C Black

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• But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.

  Milan Kundera

  Soul, Unity, Age

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• [T]ruth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred

  Ludwig Feuerbach

  Ruth, Sacred, Profane

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• What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.

  Ernest Becker

  Lying, Mean, Reality

  Ernest Becker (1997). “The Denial of Death”, p.204, Simon and Schuster

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• Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.

  Marquis de Sade

  Believe, Two, Mad

  Marquis de Sade (2016). “Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man”, p.7, BoD – Books on Demand

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