#illusion

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#illusion

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#past #present #illusion

Are you looking for something real in this world of illusions? Call me. Casual Flings need not apply. I am looking for Love. ↗

— Aprilynne Pike

#illusions #love

Love may precede respect but it cannot survive the loss of it. ↗

— Joe L. Wheeler

#grief #loss #love #love

What happened was simple, even banal: I became naked, died, lost parts of my flesh and most of my ego along with a few illusions such as a belief in the uniqueness of my personal scrap of consciousness and the cosmic importance therof, and went on from there. ↗

— MacDonald Harris

#self-importance #self-belief

Magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you and he does. ↗

— Karl Germain

#humor #illusionists #illusions #magic #magicians

[On Schopenhauer in Black and White] Schopenhauer's views of love are flawed. Love can't be merely an illusion of the mind to aid in procreation, but the path to redemption for an otherwise violently selfish species. Past human greatness has proven that when challenged, love can overpower impulsive instinct, and in essence, the vilest aspects of our nature. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#essence #flaw #human #human-condition #human-nature

...all my life I prayed to a star – Later discovered it was Venus – I was praying to Aphrodite and wondering why she was sending me you -sad... ↗

— John Geddes

#love #poetry #prayer #life

If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#double-standards #empowerment #expectations #false-belief #feminism

There's a difference between playing and playing games. The former is an act of joy, the latter — an act. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#acting #artifice #falsehood #game #games