Hallucination Best Quotes & Sayings

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data. — V.S. Ramachandran

Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East's exuberant vision of the West, the West's uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna - the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation. — M. John Harrison

The Yale anthropologist Weston La Barre goes far as to argue that 'a surprisingly good case could be made that much of culture is hallucination' and that 'the whole intent and function of ritual appears to be... a group wish to hallucinate reality'. — Carl Sagan

I'm not a hallucination. — Nora Sakavic

Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. — Alan Watts

Everything had happened so quickly, though, I never had a chance to stop and wonder if I might be chasing a hallucination. — Riggs Ransom

But why did you go," my mother asked him, "when it was bound to upset you like this?" "I went," he told her, "because every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I'd think I was having a hallucination. — Philip Roth

[William Butler] Yeats has the phrase Hodos Chameliontos, chameleon-like, in that you don't know where the beginning or the middle or the end is, so it's an unrelieved hallucination, because you don't know where you're coming in and you don't know where you're going out. It ends, you're going into the hallucination, or maybe coming out of it, I don't know. — Allen Ginsberg

Modern humans became fixated on a collective hallucination of linear time, ignoring the fractal spirals of the surrounding universe. — Daniel Pinchbeck

Of course it had been an hallucination. But when hallucinations start behaving like realities, with a score of coincidences to back them up, even a scientist has to face the possibility that he may have to treat them like realities. And when hallucinations begin to threaten you and yours in a direct physical way
No, more than that. When you must keep faith with someone you love. — Fritz Leiber

Not a hallucination. Just a normal fantasy, like a normal girl might have when she had a normal crush on her best friend. — Marissa Meyer

Black Friday is a media trap, an orchestrated mass hallucination based on herd dynamics and the media cycle. — Seth Godin

Nor could you clarify this confusion by assuming that the old man had been a victim of hallucination. Bartholomew wasn't that type of person. He was neither a liar nor a fool. — Lloyd C. Douglas

I don't think I ever relinquish a person I have known, and surely not my fictional characters. I see them, I hear them, with a clarity that I would call hallucinatory if hallucination didn't mean something else ... A character whom we create can never die, any more than a friend can die ... Through [my characters] I've lived many parallel lives. — Marguerite Yourcenar

And one day the mind leaps from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant hears God, sees God. — Oliver Sacks

Or maybe it's life that is the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleansing, a cure. — Lauren Oliver

Oh God, what do we do?"
"Do?" Levi said, looking oddly triumphant, like his plans for the night had finally materialized, Like he had been hoping for some disaster like this to happen so he didn't have to be bored anymore. Like even a dying girl in his bathtub was better than calling his mother to confirm that his grandfather actually was dead, and that what he had heard on the answering machine wasn't a mere auditory hallucination. "We save her, of course. — Matthew J. Hefti

He followed another voice. "This isn't real, man. Maybe we're having some kind of mass hallucination." "Well, you stay and check it out then," someone called back. "I'm getting the hell out of here." The wolf loped closer, scenting the human. The man was slowing down, certain none of this could be reality. The wolf leapt, covering a considerable distance in a single spring and catching the human by the seat of his pants. He got a mouthful of denim, and the man gave a high-pitched scream. Without looking back, he bolted to join his friends, his boots loud on the street as he escaped. Aidan laughed out loud this time, the sound echoing eerily, carried on the thick bed of fog. He couldn't remember the last time he had had so much fun. — Christine Feehan

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda's, "My creatures are born of a long denial," seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge ... It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it. — Julio Cortazar

The Internet is a collective hallucination: one of the best humanity has ever generated. — Jonathan Zittrain

Let's Look at Subjective Religious Experiences This Way:
What if ten thousand people went up to a mountain top, saw something, and then they all disagreed with what they saw, even people who largely agreed with each other? Even with this best possible analogy to subjective religious experiences we would still have a reason to think the lack of oxygen caused them all to hallucinate. — John W. Loftus

The best way of doing this, I found, was to write, to describe the hallucination in clear, almost clinical detail, and, in so doing, become an observer, even an explorer, not a helpless victim of the craziness inside me. — Oliver Sacks

Reality's not strange, not unexpected.Reality doesn't reside in the hallucination of events. Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness. Reality is that nothing happens. — Graham Swift

Hawksmoor had often noticed how, in the moments when he first carne upon a corpse, all the objects around it wavered for an instant and became unreal- the trees which rose above a body hidden in woodland, the movement of the river which had washed a body onto its banks, the cars or hedges in a suburban street where a murderer had left a victim, all of these things seemed at such times to be suddenly drained of meaning like an hallucination. — Peter Ackroyd

Maybe the abomination had infected her with his claws after all, and this was all some kind of fevered hallucination. This shit was crazy enough to qualify as a dream, right? — Bethany K. Lovell

If there's a rating system for quality of hallucination, I can say I was definitely scoring pretty high — Mira Grant

Your hallucination...
Yes?
Your hallucination has hallucinations.
Yes. — Brandon Sanderson

I can't stop thinking about what Caroline said to Minna about death. It isn't an infection, she said. She might be right. Then again, we've nested in the walls like bacteria. We've taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing - we've made it our own. Or maybe it's life that's the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleaning, a cure. — Lauren Oliver

That little green drink inspired hallucination is right! — Rocko

Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going," wrote Feynman, "but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly. — Richard P. Feynman

It will be as if I'd never existed. The words ran through my head, lacking the perfect clarity of my hallucination last night. They were just words, soundless, like print on a page. Just words, but they ripped the hole wide open, and I stomped on the brake, knowing I should not drive while this incapacitated.
I curled over, pressing my face against the steering wheel and trying to breathe without lungs. — Stephenie Meyer

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination. — Alan W. Watts

In the end, a vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination. — Steve Case

I caught malaria, and the medicines caused a hallucination. I dreamt I won an Oscar for acting. I know it sounds stupid, but it was so real, and I just knew then it would happen. — Rebel Wilson

If you understand hallucination and illusion, you don't blindly follow any leader. You must know if the person is sane or insane, over the abyss. — Marguerite Young

But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense-stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety-is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself ... in a way other people just can't. — Samuel R. Delany

A vision, without a plan, is just a hallucination. — Will Rogers

What changed these very ordinary men (who were such cowards that they did not dare stand too near the cross in case they got involved) into heroes who would stop at nothing? A swindle? Hallucination? Spooky nonsense in a darkened room? Or Somebody quietly doing what He said He'd do - walk right through death? What do you think? — John Bertram Phillips

The Book of Kells is the kingdom of Proteus. It is the product of a cold-blooded hallucination that did not require any mescaline or lysergic acid to produce these abysmal labyrinths, also because it does not represent the delirium of a single mind, but rather the delirium of an entire culture engaged in a dialogue with itself and citing other Gospels, other illuminated letters, other tales. — Liberato Santoro-Brienza

Thank you," he said.
I blinked. "What?"
A funny little smile played out across his lips. "Thank you for trusting me with this."
My mouth gaped.
"It's a big deal." His lashes lifted and his eyes met mine. "What we did. It was your first time. I'm honored."
Was this real?
"So thank you."
Jax closed the distance between us, melding our lips together in what had to have been the sweetest kiss possible, and I realized this was real. Not some orgasm-induced hallucination, and there was truly no wonder why I'd fallen for him. — J. Lynn

There is a curious law of art ... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination. — Northrop Frye

I'm in a shallow hole, not filled with the humming orange bubbles of my hallucination but with old, dead leaves. — Suzanne Collins