Disillusionment Quotes

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

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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

~ Bart D. Ehrman

All knowledge hurts.

~ Cassandra Clare

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 take, because the world never gave.Or so she'd thought.

~ Connie Brockway

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.

~ Henry Miller

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.

~ Kim Stanley Robinson

The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to command her. It had been answered long, long ago, claimed Moss; man's very essence lay in the fact that he had elected to command. But to Stenham that seemed a shallow reply. To him wisdom consisted in the conscious and joyous obedience to natural laws, yet when he had said that to Moss, Moss had laughed pityingly. 'My dear man, wisdom is a primitive concept,' he had told him. 'What we want now is knowledge.' Only great disillusionment could make a man say such a thing, Stenham believed.

~ Paul Bowles

I guess love distorts our perception of reality, and it’s even harder to recognize the truth when it’s buried underneath layers of what we imagine relationships should be like.

~ Shannon Mullen

How can any of us even know what to believe anymore? Our culture’s full of so much phoniness and deception. Companies advertise products to make us believe that we will be more beautiful, more healthy, or live longer by consuming their products. We are seduced by lovers who feed their porn addictions when we’re asleep. We’re taught to believe that if we work hard and take risks, that we can achieve our dreams, yet youth unemployment is the highest it’s been in decades. Fairytales tell us that true love exists, but half of all marriages end in divorce.

~ Shannon Mullen

[S]omehow, without his being aware of it, time had coated his awe with a rind of disillusionment, and the wine of wonder had turned to vinegar.

~ Joan D. Vinge

Too often it’s about what stands before us, not what stands within us.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I have suffered a loss, Forrest, far greater than my legs. It's my spirit, my soul, if you will. There is only a blank there now - medals where my soul used to be.

~ Winston Groom

In many instances, the failures of my greatest schemes ultimately lead to the fulfillment of my greatest successes. Therefore, God will allow our most cherished dreams to perish so that we might turn and seek out His most cherished plans.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Disillusioned, people simply carried out their work as intended, drinking away sobriety at the end of each hard shift and repeating the process until death.

~ Christopher Byford

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 almost speechless. Then there was the fury with herself—for she had known what Henry’s love was, and still she had gone back to suffer a little more at his hands.

~ Anna Godbersen

Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness.

~ Amanda Craig

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

~ Andy Warhol

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

~ Voltaire

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

~ Zeena Schreck

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.

~ Christopher Pike

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 is not reality as it really truly is. So enlightenment is seeing reality with bare awareness, non-conceptual reality.

~ Zeena Schreck

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 fresh disappointments.

~ Hector Berlioz

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 crowned her long dark hair which flew out behind her and across her radiant face flushed with excitement. Her blue eyes flashed and her smile registered triumph at having been chosen.

~ Clark Zlotchew

Abundant living is realizing that life is a privilege whether it’s adhering to our scripts or not.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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 . . . which always leads to disillusionment . . . which always leads to more joy— if you hang in there.

~ Kurt Bubna

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

~ Kate Forsyth

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

~ Selena Kitt

All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.

~ Harold Bloom

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.

~ Ingeborg Bachmann

Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. Before that, it is something real.

~ Lynda Barry

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 suspect they were just friendly because she was the princess and wore beautiful gowns?Did she fear that life could again change? Everything could disappear as it had done when the clock struck twelve?Did Cinderella wonder whether her good fortune was real or the trick of a magic wand?It’s a sad thing to lose belief.

~ Gita V. Reddy

I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say.

~ Oscar Wilde

It was a gift. What did I do with it? Life didn't accumulate as I'd once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried first my mother, then my father. His hair gone wispy as a child's. I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.

~ Emma Cline

Words drop from my lips spiraling downward; they land scattered on your ears. I spoke them green and golden, but you turned them shriveled brown.

~ Patricia Robin Woodruff

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 the proud emblems of a truly phenomenal life. The fearful, cautious, cynical and self-repressed do not live at all. And that is simply no way to be in this world.

~ Anthon St. Maarten

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 receiving important information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. They tell me because they regard me as safe. All of them, they make their disclosures to me in the same spirit that they might tell a castrato or a priest - with a sense that I am so outside the loop, so remote from the doings of the great world, as to be defused of any possible threat. The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has been - a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance.

~ Zoë Heller

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

~ Joe L. Wheeler

Sadness at that age had the pleasing texture of imprisonment: you reared and sulked against the bonds of parents and school and age, things that kept you from the certain happiness that awaited. When I was a sophomore in college, I had a boyfriend who spoke breathlessly of running away to Mexico - it didn't occur to me that we could no longer run away from home.

~ Emma Cline

Regret comes in four tones that operate in unison to shape our lives. First, we regret the life that we lived, the decisions we made, the words we said in anger, and enduring the shame wrought from experiencing painful failures in work and love. Secondly, we regret the life we did not live, the opportunities missed, the adventures postponed indefinitely, and the failure to become someone else other than whom we now are. American author Shannon L. Alder said, ‘One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.’ Third, we regret that parts of our life are over; we hang onto nostalgic feelings for the past. When we were young and happy, everything was new, and we had not yet encountered hardship. As we age and encounter painful setbacks, we experience disillusionment and can no longer envision a joyous future. Fourth, we experience bitterness because the world did not prove to be what we hoped or expected it would be.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster