illusions Quotes

“The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret... but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know.”

“Volunteers from the audience sometimes participate in preparation. As the trick is being setup, the magician will make use of every possible use of misdirection.”

“The third stage is sometimes called the effect, or the prestige, and this is the product of magic. If a rabbit is pulled from a hat, the rabbit, which apparently did not exist before the trick was performed, can be said to be the prestige of that trick.”

“No one cares about the man in the box, the man who disappears.”

“There is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist once put it, we all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them.”

“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.”

“But the moonlight and the setting, or maybe just the words he was saying, had somehow turned David into a pretty. Just for a moment.”

“But it’s a trick, Tally. You’ve only seen pretty faces your whole life. Your parents, your teachers, everyone over sixteen. But you weren’t born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.”

“Cash is wet to the skin. Yet the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it and the arm functioned in a tranquil conviction that rain was an illusion of the mind.”

“I’m certain some will feel threatened by this record. Some few may feel liberated. Most will simply feel that it should not exist. I needed to write it anyway.”

“A magazine is simply a device to induce people to read advertising.”

“The presence of the other boys did not comfort me; our dead come for their vengeance regardless if witnesses.”

“All I saw was his beauty, his singing limbs, the quick flickering of his feet.”

“The rosy gleam of his lip, the fevered gleam of his eyes. There was not a line anywhere on his face, nothing creased or graying; all crisp. He was spring, golden and bright. Envious death would drink his blood, and grow young again.”

“Maybe her gods are kinder than ours, and she will find rest”

“He knew, but it was not enough. The sorrow was so large it threatened to tear through my skin. When he died, all things swift and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”

“I saw then how I had changed. I did not mind anymore that I lost when we raced and I lost when we swam out to the rocks and I lost when we tossed spears or skipped stones. For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty?”

“There was more to say, but for once we did not say it. There would be other times for speaking, tonight and tomorrow and all the days after that. He let go of my hand.”

“Martha: Truth and illusion, George; you don’t know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.”

“George: Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf,… Martha: I...am...George...I...am...”

“George (Long silence) : It will be better. Martha (Long silence): I don’t…know. George: It will be…maybe. […] Martha: Just…us? ”

“George: national boundaries, the level of the ocean, political allegiances, practical morality…none of these would I stake my stick on anymore.”

“Power is an illusion of perception.”

“Nick: I married her because she was pregnant. … It was a hysterical pregnancy. She blew up, and then she went down.”

“George: the one thing in this whole sinking world that I am sure of is my … chromosomological partnership in the…creation of our…blond-eyed, blue-haired…son.”

“Martha: Our son does not have blue hair…or blue eyes, for that matter. He has green eyes…like me. George: He has blue, eyes Martha.”

“George: We got a telegram; there was a car accident, and he’s dead. POUF! … Martha: (A howl which weakens into a moan) NOOOOOOoooooo.”

“Were they not, like the chambered nautilus, only an iridescence dreamed by the sea?”

″‘The thing I like,’ said Hazel, ‘is they all speak English and they’re all Christians. That makes things so much easier.‘”

“And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.”

“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.”

“The ocean of mundane cyclic existence is like an illusion.”

″‘I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you’re in control.‘”

“The beautiful boy from my dreams turned out to be nothing more than a trickster. An illusion I was too blind to see through.”

“Forgiveness can truly be called salvation. It is the means by which illusions disappear.”

“Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.”

“The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary.”

“My passion is equal to the task.”

“You never understood, why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special... you really don’t know?... it was... it was the look on their faces..”.

“An illusion has three stages. First there is the setup, in which the nature of what might be attempted at is hinted at, or suggested, or explained.”

“My definition of love is being robbed in an alley eight times in a row and hoping that there’s something about today that makes all of this different.”

“Rocks are space, and space is illusion.”

“It is the illusion that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed; but that makes the lover into God, and no human being can live up to that.”

“Aim at secret wishes that have been thwarted or repressed, stirring up uncontrollable emotions, clouding their powers of reason. Lead the seduced to a point of confusion in which they can no longer tell the difference between illusion and reality.”

“I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.”

“I had a dream about you. We couldn’t decide on a sunrise. You wanted a tan, I only cared about the view. Then World War III fulfilled both our desires.”

“I had a dream about you last night... Unfortunately, it wasn’t a dream.”

“I had a dream about you last night. We moved into a cabin in the countryside. I couldn’t handle the spiders. You couldn’t handle my drama. I moved back to the city.”

“I had a dream about you last night... You tried to propose with a digital ceramic heater.”

“Existence is illusory or it is eternal.”

“Words of Emancipation didn’t arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.”

“Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. ”

“Love’s an illusion. It’s a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I’d rather have cash.”

″...he had the illusion that one nun was turning a cartwheel and another was trying to stand on her head. He pulled up, got off his bike and really looked back. Disappointingly, all was normal. ‘I could have sworn I saw it,’ he said.”

“Now he sits alone in his room, a sixteen-year-old boy, waiting for her to call. Wishing for her to tell him it was real. It was as perfect as he imagined. But the phone sits silently.”

By the end of this moving story, he has gotten rid of everything; he’s torn up the bus pass from the station where they met, blown the unused condoms into balloons and set them adrift from his balcony, and dropped the pot of lemon balm tea she gave him from the balcony, too.

“As he plays their relationship over in his mind like a movie, he wonders: What if his heart’s delight doesn’t call? Will life be worth living then? ”

Over the course of the novel, the youth methodically destroys each piece of memorabilia from his relationship with Ann-Katrin, whom he thinks of as Heart’s Delight (it is also another name for the lemon balm plant she grows in her bedroom).

“The world, after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a simple then-and-there decision.”

“Some economists argue that the apparent paradox rests on an illusion: there is no real ‘labor shortage,’ only a shortage of people willing to work at the wages currently being offered.”

“People see what they wish to see. And in most cases, what they are told that they see.”

“The greatest illusion,′ said the mole, ‘is that life should be perfect.‘”

“The person who is “in-love” has the illusion that his beloved is perfect.”

“be aware of these illusions and façades and to train ourselves to look through them. We must scrutinize everybody for signs of their character, no matter the appearance they present or the position they occupy.”

“Depending on the reality one must face, one may prefer to opt for illusion.”

“I like the stars. It’s the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they’re always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last.”

“An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is “just the same as” or “just as bad as” totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.”