I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.

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

Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.

I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its...

I’ve drawn this as a circle because the seasons will come and go. Joy always leads to another season of romance . . . which always leads to another season of trouble . . ....

She’d stood by that creed. No softness, because the world wasn’t soft; lots of laughter, because if you were in on the joke, the joke couldn’t be on you; And no wanting what you couldn’t...

After you’ve seen behind the facade of a stage set you can’t take the play seriously any more. You can’t go backwards and regain your ignorance; you have to move forward.

Achievement is the death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)

Strike said “Huh” again, thinking about betrayal, about how everything and everybody were just so much smoke.

In our world, to do what you want to do, you must first do what you have to do.

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I’ve decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful...

When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 41, I have come to the realization that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the...

It had been an awful thing to lose Henry the first time, to matrimony, but to discover what a false front he was capable of was another kind of blow, and it had left her...

It should not be possible for Christians to be disillusioned. We should have no illusions in the first place. Our faith is in Jesus Christ alone.

You are very harsh.”I have seen the world.

Multitasking is a highly overrated thing if you ask me. Today, we do everything in twos and threes. There is no longer time to stand and gaze, to look and ponder and to let your...

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.

leaders” without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed noting beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small...

Stories are full of people who find that, in extreme situations, they’re capable of so much more than they imagined they were. Real life is full of people who find that they’re capable of so...

If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: ‘Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start?...

The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don’t want to go there.

How strange when an illusion dies. It’s as though you’ve lost a child.

Did Cinderella wonder whether her prince would have cared for her had he first seen her in her everyday clothes? Did she believe the ladies of the palace were truly her friends or did she...

Pandora’s Box could not be unopened, no one could return to Eden.

They faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion.

Maybe I had been making a greater monster of him than he really was, or maybe I was still under his influence, for I was certain that he wanted me to believe he was no...

Yo había crecido en el convencimiento de que aquella lenta procesión de la posguerra, un mundo de quietud, miseria y rencores velados, era tan natural como el agua del grifo, y que aquella tristeza muda...

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...

I’ll take away your disillusionment, and replace it with an illusion.

Down below people were clipping by going nowhere fast. You could feel the long despairing history of the place. You could actually hear it, a low hum like the buzz of a sick bee that...

Pragmatists are sometimes more prone to illusion than dreamers; when they fall for something, they fall hard, not knowing how to protect themselves, while we dreamers are more practiced in surviving the disillusionment that follows...

…all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the...

In freedom you form in utter disgrace,the bars of my prison this night.While you drift on currents of seraphim heights,it is I who deserve to take flight.

We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.

The piercing fanfare of the brass against the brutal boom and rattle of the drums surged through the air. At the head of the Ferris band marched the drum majorette. A crimson and white shako...

Stupid girl. You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

This is not the “relativism of truth” presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist’s cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural...

The world is a cruel place, Petrosinella, and it wounds the weak.

I would look up at the moon and see that it was not the smooth orb we had all believed, but a pitted and scarred world with no air.

Every day we make the whole world new… Or else grow old.

He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.

You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

All knowledge hurts.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

There’s truths you have to grow into.

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

Elisabeth had not had her future and her parents had not had theirs, there was nothing to this so-called future which was always promised to the young.