A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.

Mandy would much rather have imaginary friends who were real than real friends who were imaginary.

One might trouble one’s dainty snout with a whiff of the taleggio displayed in an artisanal cheese shop, or take a saucer of jasmine tea and a knuckle of fennel-scented snuff at a counter of...

Some people brag about standing for something so hard and so much, that they do not realize that they are actually sitting.

A poet has to be a bit childlike at heart, and in that sense all the romantic stereotypes about poets being “eternal children”, etc, are all accurate. They believe, whatever they may say, that art...

Not all light is good. There is negative light, that can cast bad shadows.

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...

I no longer knew what was real and what wasn’t. The lines between reality and delusion had become so blurred.

Reality is a hallucination shared by most sane men.

He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire...

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,...

On a nightstand in a teenager’s room, a glass vase filled with violets leans precariously against a wall. The only thing saving the vase from a thousand-piece death on the hardwood floor is the groove...

There was some kind of scuffle two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened up to reveal two brawlers being separated and pulled away from their fight....

If there is no picture, there is no proof.

Note for a moment do I take you for a truth that is real,’ Ivan exclaimed in what even amounted to fury. ‘You are a falsehood, you are my illness, you are a ghost. Only...

A hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined, and if it previously could not be imagined then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it...

x” in an indeterminate equation. I am one of life’s ghosts, who has lost all the ends and the beginnings, and even at last forgotten what to call myself. You are laughing . . ....

The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.

At this point, the sequence of my memories is disrupted.I sank into a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations, in which the grotesque and the horrible kept close company. Prostrate, as if I were...