#illusion

One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion ↗

— Voltaire

#optimism #status-quo #illusion

Friendship was another illusion like love, though it did not reach the same mad heights. People pretended that they were friends, when the fact was they were brought together by force of circumstances. ↗

— R.K. Narayan

#illusion #love #art

Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice. ↗

— Asti Hustvedt

#decadence #decadent #illusion #language #literature

I don't mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusion about freedom plague them both. ↗

— Yann Martel

#illusion #religion #zoo #freedom

But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#indifference #love #unrequited-love #love

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#delusions #fantasy #illusions #religion #religion

In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her. ↗

— Kim Edwards

#heartbreak #romantic

Manifest plainness, Embrace simplicity, Reduce selfishness, Have few desires. ↗

— Lao Tzu

#envy #greed #illusions #selfishness #simplicity

As far as her mom was concerned, tea fixed everything. Have a cold? Have some tea. Broken bones? There's a tea for that too. Somewhere in her mother's pantry, Laurel suspected, was a box of tea that said, 'In case of Armageddon, steep three to five minutes'. ↗

— Aprilynne Pike

#cold #tea #illusion

When my mind plays tricks on me I can deal. But when my mind plays tricks on my mind I can not tell what's real ↗

— Stanley Victor Paskavich

#illusion #mania #manic #mental-illness #reality