“[laughing to himself] But, man, you're never going to get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We'll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don…”— Paddy Chayefsky, Howard Beale, Peter Finch, imdb.com
“Learning to see the puzzle in everything. They're everywhere. Once you start looking, it's impossible to stop. It just so happens that people, with all the deceits and illusions that inform everything they do, tend to be the most fascinating puzzles of all.”— Craig Sweeny, Sherlock Holmes, Jonny Lee Miller, imdb.com
“Our minds, it turns out, are very good at persuading us to follow intuitions about happiness that turn out to be entirely wrong.”— Adam Sternbergh, thecut.com
“In vain do we seek tranquility in the desert; temptations are always with us; our passions, represented by the demons, never let us alone: those monsters created by the heart, those illusions produced by the mind, those vain specters that are our errors and our lies always appear before us to seduce…”— Baron de Montesquieu, amazon.com
“You could perhaps say ‘happiness’ but ‘happiness’ is misleading, for it suggests continuous chirpiness and joy, whereas ‘fulfillment’ seems compatible with a lot of pain and suffering, which every decent life must by necessity have.”— Alain de Botton, dailystoic.com
“There are some as are what they are. And there are some as aren't what they seem to be. And there are some as only seem to be what they seem to be.”— Neil Gaiman, amazon.com
“Yes, it is wildly painful when our illusions burst, as when a loved one dies or simply leaves us, but like a crushed flower emanating sweet fragrance under heel, the difficult loss can yield new appreciation for how little time we have to live the dream dancing in the heart of our authentic truth.”— Bryan Reeves, amazon.com
“I think the great illusion of adulthood is that you’re going to get to this phase and be like ‘Oh, now I feel grounded and I feel like I know how to get from here to there.’ But that’s the thing with life. Maybe that’s so and then somebody gets sick and you have to deal with all the feelings that co…”— Anna Sale, thetimbre.com