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.

All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role – grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with...

Romance is finding your fantasy in people who don’t have it.

I wish they’d conduct a national poll to find out who feels out of place and who doesn’t. Just to get the numbers, you know? To get a feel for how many of us there...

My hopes were all dead — struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming...

Jerusalem has a way of disappointing in tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to this city’s asylum,...

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked...

Never shy away from opportunity and wholehearted living. Never be fearful of putting yourself out there. The courageous may encounter many disappointments, experience profound disillusionment, gather many wounds; but cherish your scars for they are...

Dreaming about being an actress, is more exciting then being one.

Life when one first arrives is a continual mortification as one’s romantic illusions are successively shattered and the musical treasure-house of one’s imagination crumbles before the hopelessness of the reality. Every day fresh experiences bring...

In order to understand why one chooses to be a Tantric practitioner, there has to be an understanding of cause and effect, cyclic existence, the awareness that the reality that we think we are seeing...

But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing?Who...

If Gissing is less compassionately observant than Mrs Gaskell, less overtly polemical than Kingsley, still The Nether World and Demos would be sympathetically endorsed by either of them, or by their typical readers. Yet Gissing...

We are sorry about the way things turned out. We gave, in the phrasing of our words if not literally in the words themselves, the false impression that these pages might hold some small fragment,...

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity...

Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.

Nostalgia is an illness for those who haven’t realized that todayis tomorrow’s nostalgia.

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.