Source: http://www.sharenator.com/Insane_illusions_architecture/

Illusions are the truths we live by until we know better.

-          Nancy Gibbs

If I am not for myself, who is for me?

If I am only for myself, what am I?

If not now, when?

-          Hillel

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

-          Mark Twain

It is our illusions that create the world.

-          Didier Cauwelaert

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

-          Arnold Newman

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

-          Alan Watts

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

-          Elizabeth Bowen

It is respectable to have illusions – and safe – and profitable, and dull.

-          Joseph Conrad

I’ve looked at life from both sides now

From win and lose and still somehow

It’s life’s illusions I recall

I really don’t know life at all.

-          Joni Mitchell

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

-          Albert Einstein

Sergei Yesenin (4 Oct. 1895 – 27 Dec. 1925)

My Life

It appears, my life is fated to torment;

My way is dammed up by grief and distress.

My life has been severed from fun and enjoyment,

Vexation and wounds are afflicting my chest.

It seems I’m fated to suffer from pain.

All I have in this life are bad luck and misfortune.

I have suffered enough in this life, and again

Both my body and soul have been put to the torture.

The expanse, vast and hazy, promises joy,

Sighs and tears, however, are the real solutions.

A storm will break out, the thunder – oh boy! -

Will ruin the magical luscious illusions.

Now I know life’s deception, and nevertheless

I don’t want to complain of bad luck and misfortune.

So my soul doesn’t suffer from grief and distress,

No one ever can help to relieve me from torture.

 1911-1912

[first lines]

Arthur Edens: Michael. Dear Michael. Of course it’s you, who else could they send, who else could be trusted? I… I know it’s a long way and you’re ready to go to work… all I’m saying is wait, just wait, just-just-just… please hear me out because this is not an episode, relapse, fuck-up, it’s…

I’m begging you Michael. I’m begging you. Try and make believe this is not just madness because this is not just madness. Two weeks ago I came out of the building, okay, I’m running across Sixth Avenue, there’s a car waiting, I got exactly 38 minutes to get to the airport and I’m dictating. There’s this, this panicked associate sprinting along beside me, scribbling in a notepad, and suddenly she starts screaming, and I realize we’re standing in the middle of the street, the light’s changed, there’s this wall of traffic, serious traffic speeding towards us, and

I… I-I freeze, I can’t move, and I’m suddenly consumed with the overwhelming sensation that I’m covered with some sort of film. It’s in my hair, my face… it’s like a glaze… like a… a coating, and… at first I thought, oh my god, I know what this is, this is some sort of amniotic – embryonic – fluid. I’m drenched in afterbirth, I’ve-I’ve breached the chrysalis, I’ve been reborn. But then the traffic, the stampede, the cars, the trucks, the horns, the screaming and I’m thinking no-no-no-no, reset, this is not rebirth, this is some kind of giddy illusion of renewal that happens in the final moment before death.

And then I realize no-no-no, this is completely wrong because I look back at the building and I had the most stunning moment of clarity. I… I… I… I realized Michael, that I had emerged not from the doors of Kenner, Bach, and Ledeen, not through the portals of our vast and powerful law firm, but from the asshole of an organism whose sole function is to excrete the… the-the-the poison, the ammo, the defoliant necessary for other, larger, more powerful organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity.

And that I had been coated in this patina of shit for the best part of my life. The stench of it and the stain of it would in all likelihood take the rest of my life to undo. And you know what I did? I took a deep cleansing breath and I set that notion aside. I tabled it. I said to myself as clear as this may be, as potent a feeling as this is, as true a thing as I believe that I have witnessed today, it must wait. It must stand the test of time. And Michael, the time is now.