Illusion And Dream Quotes & Sayings

The woman you thought you talked to was like one out of my novels, nothing more than a dream, and illusion I conjured to feel better. That's all I ever will be, unable to be that woman in real life. — Nicole Kiefer

Finding Grant however and living happily ever after was an illusion, a dream. Things like that didn't happen to women like them. Things like that didn't happen in real life. Real life was shacking up with a man you didn't love just to have the security of a roof over your head.
Elle Ison — Shawn Reilly

in the universal womb that is boundless space
all forms of matter and energy occur
as flux of the four elements,
but all are empty forms, absent in reality:
all phenomena, arising in pure mind, are like that.

just as dream is a part of sleep,
unreal in its arising,
so all and everything is pure mind,
never separated from it,
and without substance or attribute.

experience is neither mind nor anything but mind;
it is a vivid display of emptiness, like magical illusion,
in the very moment inconceivable and unutterable.
all experience arising in the mind,
at its inception, know it as emptiness! — Longchenpa

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break ... I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun. — Edward Abbey

Swinging back and forth
deeply stuck
in tranced forbidden dream
Wanting not to recognize
fantasy
is purely scheme
Elaborate facade
of lust
into reality
Transferring thoughts
of illusion
will be fatality — Zuky Rose Leigh

They were tough and sour, but as Pushkin said, 'Dearer to us than a host of truths is an exalting illusion.' I saw a happy man, whose cherished dream had so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, had gotten what he wanted, who was content with his fate and with himself. For some reason there had always been something sad mixed with my thoughts about human happiness, but now, at the sight of a happy man, I was overcome by an oppressive feeling close to despair.
- Gooseberries — Anton Chekhov

I was overpowered by the mere sensation of that dream and it alone survived in my sorely wounded heart. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari. — John C. Hawkes

The democratic concept of man is false, because it is Christian. The democratic concept holds that ... each man is a sovereign being. This is the illusion, dream, and postulate of Christianity. — Karl Marx

It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. I saw a happy man, one whose dearest dream had come true, who had attained his goal in life, who had got what he wanted, and was pleased with his destiny and with himself. — Anton Chekhov

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue ... — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Seasons had come and gone; presidents in Kabul had been inaugurated and murdered; an empire had been defeated; old wars had ended and new ones had broken out. But Mariam had hardly noticed, hardly cared. She had passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. 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 somehow, over these last months, Laila and Aziza - a harami like herself, as it turned out - had become extensions of her, and now, without them, the life Mariam had tolerated for so long suddenly seemed intolerable.
We're leaving this spring, Aziza and I. Come with us, Mariam. — Khaled Hosseini

Light Breeze

As regards feeling pain,
like a hand cut in battle,
consider the body a robe you wear.


When you meet someone you love,
do you kiss their clothes?
Search out who's inside.


Union with God is sweeter
than body comforts.

We have hands and feet
different from these.
Sometimes in dream we see them.
That is not illusion.
It's seeing truly.
You do have a spirit body;

don't dread leaving the physical one. Sometimes someone feels this truth so strongly that he or she can live in mountain solitude totally refreshed.


The worried, heroic doings of men and women seem weary and futile to dervishes enjoying the light breeze of spirit. — Jalaluddin Rumi

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober. — Eugene O'Neill

What is this life? A frenzy, an illusion,
A shadow, a delirium, a fiction.
The greatest good's but little, and this life
Is but a dream, and dreams are only dreams. — Pedro Calderon De La Barca

Whether it is a simulated experience or a dream, the information that exists is all real ... and an illusion at the same time. — Masamune Shirow

I'm average. I've been average most of my life, but there are moments where I feel extraordinary. Invincible. Able to conquer any fear and step outside any box. There is no illusion, no fantasy. I can climb a forty-foot pole. I can fly eighty-feet in the air. I can be taller than tall. It's a dream that I'm living. Every day. With him. — Krista Ritchie

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. — Janet Fitch

Ah," Gary said dreamily. " 'Free time.' I've heard about that. Don't fool yourself, Fire-Top. What with extra hours of lessons for punishments, and the extra work you get every day, free time is an illusion. It's what you get when you die and the gods reward you for a life spent working from dawn until midnight. We all face up to it sooner or later
the only real free time you get here is what my honored sire chooses to give you, when he thinks you have earned it."
"And he doesn't give it to you at night," Alex put in. "He gives it to you when you've been here awhile, on Market Day and sometimes a morning or afternoon all to yourself. But never at night. At night you study. During the day you study. In your sleep
— Tamora Pierce

The human phenomenon is but the sum
Of densely coiled layers of illusion
Each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity
That there are persons of any kind
When all there can be is mindless mirrors
Laughing and screaming as they parade about
in an endless dream
— Thomas Ligotti

In 2004, the iPod was a novelty, and tablet computers were a dream. Now we take for granted that we can see whatever we want whenever and wherever we want to see it, be it 'Grand Illusion' or 'Duck Dynasty.' — Terry Teachout

It's overwhelming. I feel as if I am living in an illusion a dream where all things are possible. Amazing things do happen I know but always to someone else always in some far off place and time. — Christopher Paolini

The American Dream became America's god; wealth and abundance have become the measure of America's success. But - as recent events have shown - we have been living an illusion. — Billy Graham

im not sure what is a dream and what is real. or if real is a real word and if words even exist outside of our imagination. i still can't say for certain if falling asleep is opening your eyes in the morning or closing them at night. and im lonely. but not sadly. everybody is alone. i want love like love wants love. and im not scared to be alive. these days more people are. money is an illusion. the world has been gaining some sort of momentum over "time" and every day it's spinning faster. we are growing up too quickly. someday i'll start too. — Jason Reeves

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams. — Pedro Calderon De La Barca

He felt as if he were under an intolerable physical strain, as if his body were likely at any moment to fly to pieces. Other strange physical symptoms came to trouble him. An unpleasant odour lingered in his nostrils, as if he could literally smell the sulphur of the pit; and he had from time to time the curious illusion that his flesh was turning black. He had to look continually at his hands to be sure that it was not so. Nightmares troubled him, waking and sleeping - and one bad dream conjured up another, running from box to box to release its fellows. The world around him seemed to have become equally mad and hateful. The newspapers were full of stories of grotesque violence and unnatural crimes. He knew neither how to go on nor what to do to bring these horrors to an end. — Iris Murdoch

What can we say to people who think that dreams are the real world and this one is an illusion. Perhaps they're right. — Lothaire Bluteau

There is only Love
and Stories. All else is but a shadow dream. — Vera Nazarian

It's fear of the unknown. The unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars, peace, love, hate, all that-it's all illusion. Unknown is what it is. Accept that it's unknown and it's plain sailing. Everything is unknown-then you're ahead of the game. That's what it is. Right? — John Lennon

If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more that we all shared the dream of never dying or traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner more unhappy illusion we call normal life. — Scott Spencer

Friend, many and many a dream is mere confusion a cobweb of no consequence at all. Two gates for ghostly dreams there are: One gateway of honest horn, and one of ivory. Issuing by the ivory gate are dreams of glimmering illusion, fantasies, but those that come through solid polished horn may be borne out, if mortals only know them. — Homer

She told herself that she longed greatly to go back to those dear merry days when life was seen through a rosy mist of hope and illusion, and possessed an indefinable something that had passed away forever. Where was it now
the glory and the dream? — L.M. Montgomery

Even though we express emotions and feel motion, life is nothing but a dream and a magical illusion. — Debasish Mridha

When I reflect upon what I have seen, what I have heard, what I have done, I can hardly persuade myself that all that frivolous hurry and bustle and pleasure of the world had any reality; and I look on what has passed as one of those wild dreams which opium occasions, and I by no means wish to repeat the nauseous dose for the sake of the fugitive illusion. — Lord Chesterfield

Human domination over nature is quite simply an illusion, a passing dream by a naive species. It is an illusion that has cost us much, ensnared us in our own designs, given us a few boasts to make about our courage and genius, but all the same it is an illusion. — Donald Worster

The world, life and human beings are only an illusion, a phantom, a dream image. — August Strindberg

There are no chains of houses; there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of these houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no single house of all those millions which has not seemed to someone at some time the heart of all things and the end of travel. — G.K. Chesterton

You convinced yourselves we're just a bunch of regular lads who got a bad break in life. Anything else would have cracked your dream open and made you face reality. Illusion is easy. Illusion is the loser's way out. Your way. — Peter F. Hamilton

Like the first two revolutions, chaos cuts away at the tenets of Newton's physics. As one physicist put it: Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability. — James Gleick

That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained. — Haile Selassie

The pursuit of a dream has a supernatural sense to it. It is a reaching beyond the moment towards a momentum meeting probability meeting hope. The human subsists to the dream in the beginning. But the mathematical measures of realization are never quite tangible. That money is the true worth of a dream is an illusion and money should subsist to the human in the end. — Dew Platt

She, whose life had blown up, emptying her of history and leaving in its place only that dark dream of majesty, that illusion so powerful that it demanded to enter the sphere of what-was-real - she, rootless Bilquis, who now longed for stability, for no-more-explosions, had discerned in Raza a boulder-like quality on which she would build her life. He was a man rooted solidly in an indeflectible sense of himself, and that made him seem invincible. — Salman Rushdie

I consider the positions of kings and rulers as that of dust motes. I observe treasure of gold and gems as so many bricks
and pebbles. I look upon the finest silken robes as tattered rags. I see myriad worlds of the universe as small seeds of
fruit, and the greatest lake in India as a drop of oil on my foot. I perceive the teachings of the world to be the illusion of,
magicians. I discern the highest conception of emancipation as golden brocade in a dream, and view the holy path of the
illuminated one as flowers appearing in one's eyes. I see meditation as a pillar of a mountain, Nirvana as a nightmare of
daytime. I look upon the judgment of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs
as but traces left by the four seasons. — Gautama Buddha

When I compare life to a dream I do not mean to denigrate it as some sort of meaningless fantasy. Life is too wonderful to be called an "illusion" unless we whisper the word in amazement, as we might when witnessing the most astonishing magic trick. What could be more magnificent than this glorious universe, in all its multifarious extravagance? Its awesome vastness and delicate detail. Its impersonal precision and intimate intensity. Its harsh necessities and lush sensuality. This dream of life is truly marvelous. — Timothy Freke

Once you empower people and say,' Here you are, now you get to dream the great dream of becoming a full citizen with equal rights and radical improvement in your living situation,' you are creating an illusion which will break one day. — Pankaj Mishra

Life's just a dream. It isn't real. I know that you can't see that yet. You want me to wake up but in my death I did wake up and I saw you were still sleeping. — Kate McGahan

How many solutions are found to family problems if we take time to reflect? If we think of a husband or wife and we dream about their good qualities that they have? Don't ever lose the illusion of when you were boyfriend and girlfriend! — Pope Francis

The next day was a dream of such perfection that I have never approached the like again. It was, of course, all illusion, but I like to think of it still in isolation from what came after,as a moment of bliss, one of those days when on is no longer oneself, but becomes bigger, and better, able to overcome the normal preoccupations of life and breathe more freely. — Iain Pears

Then she had doubts about the reality of her situation and wondered if her imminent departure was not the illusion of a dream. — George Sand

That which is seen and that which is touched are of a dream-like and illusion-like nature. Because feeling arises together with the mind, it is not [ultimately] perceived. — Shantideva

When a writer with a voice as good as Richard Christian Matheson's tells you something, you have no choice but to listen. In THE RITUAL OF ILLUSION the voices are legion, and the gaps between their testimonies drag us closer to understanding the darkly beating heart of all our, ephemeral, transfixing dreams. Dark, subtle, horrifically funny. — Michael Marshall Smith

What is time and space? Time and space is an illusion we see that brings about this idea of separation. It is the exact opposite of Oneness where everything is just one whole. We are, in Oneness, of just one mind. Just as when I dream of people at night those people are all me, we are all God, or of the Source, within His mind, so to speak. Time and space is what creates the illusion. Now, in order to demonstrate separation, the idea within the mind of the Oneness has to part everything to show that it is separated. In order to demonstrate that things have been parted, you must have space between them. That's all space is. Literally just an openness between and around things to demonstrate that within the illusion things are parted and viewable as individual items. This brings about a by-product. Time. As — Steven Dean

The communist world, it may be noted, has one big myth (which we call an illusion, in the vain hope that our superior judgment will make it disappear). It is the time-hallowed archetypal dream of a Golden Age (or Paradise), where everything is provided in abundance for everyone, and a great, just, and wise chief rules over a human kindergarten. — C. G. Jung

Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life's setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we've stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won't be more than this nothingness. — Fernando Pessoa

Truth is not something you can appropriate easily and quickly. You certainly cannot sleep or dream yourself to the truth. No, you must be tried, do battle, and suffer if you are to acquire the truth for yourself. It is a sheer illusion to think that in relation to the truth there is an abridgement, a short cut that dispenses with the necessity for struggling for it. — Soren Kierkegaard

We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight - the light of our particular day. — Loren Eiseley

There are other relations besides reality, which the mind is capable of grasping and which also are primary, like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream. — Louis Aragon

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. — Henry James

Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along palm-tree-lined streets in Watts hunted each other with automatic weapons. — James Lee Burke

When the fear of failure triumphs over the repugnance of mediocrity, we must resign ourselves to the status quo. Every change, every opportunity to do something different will send us running to hide beneath a cover of excuses and complacency. Those few courageous souls who delve into the lands where they risk failure, will be soundly ridiculed. They will be condemned not because they dream, but rather for making their dreams real and destroying the illusion that all that can be thought has been thought, all that can be done has been done, and all that can be felt has been felt. In their enthusiastic insolence, they see life filled with infinite possibilities and they know they must chart their own course, even if they must go alone. — D.A. Blankinship

In our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever ... listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, It is all one vast awakened thing. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It's a dream already ended. — Jack Kerouac

The feeling that was born that night, how could i describe it?Words like love or lust just don't seem right. I may call it jealousy, or may be anxiety and moreover, need. Even now I'm anxious at times because when I am with Ren, everything around feels like a dream. That was how Ren turned my boring life into an illusion, and that was too much for no matter how hard i tried, it seemed I could never catch him. — Ai Yazawa

Lord Daldace looked about as if seeing the villa for the first time. "What are dreams? Ordinary experience is a dream. The eyes, the ears, the nose: they present pictures on the brain, and these pictures are called 'reality'. At night, when we dream, other pictures, of source unknown, are impinged. Sometimes the dream-images are more real than 'reality'. Which is solid, which illusion? Why trouble to make the distinction? — Jack Vance

The dream of life is really an illusion, and everybody lives in the reality he or she creates - a virtual reality that is only true for the one who creates it. — Miguel Angel Ruiz

Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom. "Buy a car," it says, "and be free. Buy a boat and be free." Is this not the raw material of bad dreams? Or is it maybe the very nightmare itself? — Wendell Berry

Carrying The Beatles' or the Sixties' dream around all your life is like carrying the Second World War and Glenn Miller around. That's not to say you can't enjoy Glenn Miller or The Beatles, but to live in that dream is the twilight zone. It's not living now. It's an illusion. — John Lennon

Many Sages have said, "Your world is a dream. You're living in an illusion." They're referring to this world of the mind and the way we believe our thoughts about reality. When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. — Adyashanti

It's all sort of dreams and it's all illusion. It's theater; it's not real. We're making up stories, you know, and people tend to run into you and believe you are your characters. And I suppose the funny thing is the longer you go, you do become sort of some version of [your characters]. You both diverge from them - you know - you live, but you also permanently inhabit that geography and that mental space - and so you do morph a little bit. We do become what we imagine. — Bruce Springsteen

Just because some dreams never see light that doesn't make us nonbelievers, they are wings to our sky and fiction makes us dream. I know the truth is fatal, especially for the stubborn's but trust me the illusion is worse. — Parul Wadhwa

Death is an illusion, life is a dream and you are the creator of your own imagination. — L.J. Vanier

Her features were dainty, her small slender wrists climbed up to become the delicate shoulders that beckoned him. Her skin was like peach-tinted cream and he need not have touched her to experience the melting softness of her body. Her perfectly oval face was austere and her manner a little haughty. Her expressions had delicacy as well as a particular strength that did not abate her femininity. It seemed that the world had stopped. Her voice sounded like a melody and she looked like a dream, an illusion, up close and personal. — Faraaz Kazi

Children's literature must build a bridge between the colorful dream world full of fantasy and illusion, and a tougher real world full of twists and turns. The child armed with the torch of knowledge, awareness and guidance must cross this bridge and set foot to the intense harshness of the bigger world. — Samad Behrangi

It was only vanity and discouragement that sometimes made me feel alone with my endless love, but now that I was taking one of the risks my heart had urged upon me I could also feel I was not alone. If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more than we all shared the dream of never dying or of traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner, more unhappy illusion we call normal life. After all, the intimations of endless love were the same now as they were thousands of years before, while normal life had changed a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. Which then, was more real? — Scott Spencer

Before embarking on a voyage, first speak with the ancient sailors, listen to and understand the winds, then patiently make a boat and sail. Yet, even then, be open to other dreams, changes, circumstances. Throughout our lives, we limit ourselves to fixed goals, only to get on the local ferry and just travel the distance between two known points. Yet, we create an illusion of freedom and choice, accompanied by a sense of independence. Thus, we carefully study weather reports, ride on the port side on odd numbered days, starboard on holidays, have tea at fixed times, never speak with those who wear glasses, always smile at those who wear green and of course allow ourselves just the slight possibility of a dream about jumping ship and going off to our island one day.
C'est la vie? Our predictably totalitarian lives are an insult to the human spirit. — Gunduz Vassaf

Illusion doesn't mean that something is not real. Illusion simply means that something is less real than something else. This life and this world certainly exist - who is to say the reality of the dream is not real? — Frederick Lenz

On the road leading from his ranch to Samantha's, Wyat t drove his surrey up a small hill and caught his breath as the beauty of the large crescent moon dangling just out of reach over the crest A full moon would have been plump with luminescence, yet the pearly surface of the sickle still cast enough light to shadow his surroundings and seemed close enough that once he drove to the top of the hill, he'd be able to touch the bottom horn or at least toss a rope around it. He slackened the reins, slowing the horse, knowing that the higher he climbed, the sooner the illusion of closeness would disappear and he wanted to preserve for a moment the fantasy that the moon was within his grasp.
The stars, by contrast, were distant pricks of diamond light farther out than a man could dream. He sighed. Life as a rancher or as a rancher's wife was not moon and stars easy or romantic. What would put stars in Samantha's eyes? — Debra Holland

He also saw that matter is a mirror - everything is a mirror that reflects light and creates images of that light - and the world of illusion, the Dream, is just like smoke which doesn't allow us to see what we really are. "The real us is pure love, pure light," he said. — Miguel Ruiz

People seem to forget that there is a huge difference between the peace which is a gift of God and passes all understanding, and peace in the psychological sense. If we are living in a dream or illusion, or have certain psychological blocks, we should not be surprised that we become troubled when someone brings us face-to-face with reality. Sometimes we have to lose psychological peace before we can live in true peace. — Jean Vanier

Enlightenment says the world is nothing Nothing but a dream, everything's an illusion And nothing is real. — Van Morrison

Awakening is waking up from the daytime dream and realizing that who you thought you were is not limited to thought, emotion or form. Beyond the imaginary seeker, beyond concepts and beliefs, there is a field of innocence and purity. We are this deep peace and sacredness, which is absolute and beyond all intellectual understanding. I invite you to recognize this Essence of Being and to directly realize the illusion of all psychological suffering due to misidentification, misperception of separation and attachment to conditioned thought. — Katie Davis

How do you write a memory? For that matter, what is a memory? A remembrance, a dream of the past that floats into the present on occasion? What are memories? Are they illusion? For if memory is illusion, then how can we be sure of what is real? Illusions are fabricated, sometimes they are an accident, sometimes they are pure deception, and how do we tell the difference? Do you start with the person? Do you start with the idea? How can you begin with either if you can't decide on one? How can you write a memory if you don't even know what it is? How do you create something that has never before been created? If we don't know what our memories are, do we know what the present is? Do we know what the future holds? If we don't know what memories are then do we know what the past was? And if we question what we know, how can we be sure of anything? How can we be sure what's currently happening is real, and not a vivid memory being relived over and over in painful remembrance? — Stephen Vaughn

We fall into the great continuing circle of dancers. Some leave the floor, tired but giddy; others have only just arrived. They are eager to wear their new status as ladies, to be paraded about and lauded until they see themselves with new eyes. The fathers beam at their daughters, thinking them perfect flowers in need of their protection, while the mothers watch from the margins, certain this moment is their doing. We create illusions we need to go on. And one day, when they no longer dazzle or comfort, we tear them down, brick by glittering brick, until we are left with nothing but the bright light of honesty. The light is liberating. Necessary. Terrifying. We stand naked and emptied before it. Adn when it is too much for our eyes to take, we build a new illusion to shield us from its relentless truth.
But the girls! Their eyes glow with the fever dream of all they might become. They tell themselves this is the beginning of everything. And who am I to say it isn't? — Libba Bray

I AM LOVE

I have rubbed shoulders with presidents, stars and queens

Though they know not my name as I have never been seen

I have touched their hearts, lips and minds

Always gentle, caring, giving and kind

I have shaped their world and changed their lives

I can turn war to peace so they put down their guns

I have fed every life with my innocent arms

I touch their lives though they don't know my name

I touch their hearts they are never the same

I come with truth, wisdom and joy

Though some people hurt me treat me like a toy

I am ever present but never seen

I visit at night just like a dream

Like an illusion, ever present but oh so rare

I am a joy to be seen with every stare

Who am I?

Love! — Jill Thrussell

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

Something I tried to hold onto, to touch if only for a moment, but it slipped away from me like the air, like an illusion, or a dream that floats away and is lost. I wept in my sleep as though it was something I was losing now; a loss I was experiencing for the first time, and not something I had lost a long time ago. — Nawal El Saadawi

The Door Without a Key is the Door of Dreams; it is the door by which the sensitive escape into insanity when life is too hard for them, and artists use it as a window in a watch-tower. Psychologists call it a psychological mechanism; magicians call it magic, and the man in the street calls it illusion or charlatanry according to taste. It does not matter to me what it is called, for it is effectual. — Dion Fortune

We think that we are living when we walk upon the earth but the very moment we "die" there, we wake up here! This life on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge is the real one. We find that our life on earth was just a dream, a dream designed to lead us further and further into love. True love grows and then cannot be destroyed. It grows and grows until it is stronger than death. — Kate McGahan

And who cares for imagination? Who does not think it a rather dangerous, senseless attribute, akin to weakness, perhaps partaking of frenzy - a disease rather than a gift of the mind?
Probably all think it so but those who possess, or fancy they possess it. To hear them speak, you would believe that their hearts would be cold if that elixir did not flow about them, that their eyes would be dim if that flame did not refine their vision, that they would be lonely if this strange companion abandoned them. You would suppose that it imparted some glad hope to spring, some fine charm to summer, some tranquil joy to autumn, some consolation to winter, which you do not feel. All illusion, of course; but the fanatics cling to their dream, and would not give it for gold. — Charlotte Bronte