Disillusionment Quotes

The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men’s House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility … The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community “leaders” without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed noting beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; they younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream—the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah’s Ark but who yet were drunk on finance.

~ Ralph Ellison

Captain Harcourt-Bruce was not only dashing, handsome, and brave, he was also rather romantic. The reappearance of magic in England thrilled him immensely. He was a great reader of the more exciting sort of history - and his head was full of ancient battles in which the English were outnumbered by the French and doomed to die, when all at once would be heard the sound of strange, unearthly music, and upon a hilltop would appear the Raven King in his tall, black helmet with it's mantling of raven-feathers streaming in the wind; he would gallop down the hillside on his tall, black horse with a hundred human knights and a hundred fairy knights at his back, and he would defeat the French by magic.That was Captain Harcourt-Bruce's idea of a magician. That was the sort of thing which he now expected to see reproduced on every battlefield on the Continent. So when he saw Mr Norrell in his drawing-room in Hanoversquare, and after he had sat and watched Mr Norrell peevishly complain to his footman, first that the cream in his tea was too creamy, and next that it was too watery - well, I shall not surprize you when I say he was somewhat disappointed. In fact he was so downcast by the whole undertaking that Admiral Paycocke, a bluff old gentleman, felt rather sorry for him and only had the heart to laugh at him and tease him very moderately about it.

~ Susanna Clarke

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.

~ Sylvia Plath

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.

~ Sylvia Plath

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

~ Marilyn Monroe

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 knows? Maybe that was 'despair.' What Turgenev called 'disillusionment.' Or Dostoyevsky, 'hell.' Or Somerset Maugham, 'reality.' Whatever the label, I figured it was me.

~ Haruki Murakami

If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: 'Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, catologuing other people's books instead of writing your own? What had become of the Ram, the Bull and the Lion, the example I gave you to emulate? Where above all is the Virgin, with her shining face and curling tresses, whom I entrusted to you'- what should I say?I should have an answer ready. 'Well, it was you who let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun, and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made me.'To which he might reply: 'But you have had half a century to get over it! Half a century, half the twentieth century, that glorious epoch, that golden age that I bequeathed to you!''Has the twentieth century,' I should ask, 'done so much better than I have? When you leave this room, which I admit is dull and cheerless, and take the last bus to your home in the past, if you haven't missed it - ask yourself whether you found everything so radiant as you imagined it. Ask yourself whether it has fulfilled your hopes. You were vanquished, Colston, you were vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you hoped so much of.

~ L.p. Hartley

Just realize that the Mechanics do not exist and are not worthy of your attention. Unless they threaten you, and then you must kill them, Mage Alain. Mechanics are as merciless as they are mercenary. If any appear dangerous, kill them. ...What if he had remembered that advice during the bandit attack, when the Mechanic had pointed her weapon at his face? He could have killed her then. He could have tried at least. Then, when she was dead, the bandits would have found Alain and killed him, too. Clearly the advice of his elders was lacking in some respects.

~ Jack Campbell

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.

~ Zeena Schreck

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 had never even glimpsed her.

~ Kim Edwards

We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.

~ Will Durant

Every day we make the whole world new... Or else grow old.

~ John Valentine

But I could not fully admit it, even then. The way Suzanne's face looked as she watched him - I wanted to be with her. I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they'd understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly.

~ Emma Cline

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 more than a harmless man who happened to use vampirism to get what he desired. Some remnant of his mesmerism was still upon me. I had never been able to shake the feeling that he was tucked away in a corner of my mind, that he could read my thoughts, know what I was thinking. He had done something to me, but what that was, I had never been able to discover. All I knew was that the feeling had been with me since the morning I woke up and found myself in Venice.

~ Melika Dannese Lux

I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.

~ Bauvard

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 at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed.

~ Raymond Chandler

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 actual condition even before it loses them.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

~ Oscar Wilde

The institution known as school isn't just a facility for doing classwork. It's essentially a microcosm of society, all of humanity put together in a little diorama. Bully exists in schools because war and conflict exist in the world, and school castes reflect our stratified, hierarchical society. Living in a democracy, the tyranny of the majority naturally applies at school, too. The majority -- that is to say, the people with the most friends -- are superior.

~ Wataru Watari

When you confront, you save yourself of disillusionment.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

~ Jodi Picoult

It's true we all build imaginary prisons for ourselves. Believe that we are trapped behind the invisible bars of the lives we have somehow carelessly constructed for ourselves, despite our youthful promises to ourselves. We see adults who are stagnant and miserable as we grow up. They graffiti the walls behind them with their mistakes and we swear secret oaths that we will heed those warnings. We’re much too clever, we know all the shortcuts and the back alleys.

~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

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.

~ Craig Froman

...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 bust

~ Nathanael West

In our world, to do what you want to do, you must first do what you have to do.

~ Anirudh Arun

When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 41, I have come to the realization that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the world. Try as I might, I have not been able to manufacture outcomes the way I thought I could, either in my own life or other people’s.

~ Tullian Tchividjian

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 resonated with the fragments of a million broken dreams.

~ Sol Luckman

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, some slight fragrance of a greater truth. That there might be something here to be learned. Before we go any further the author of this cartoon wishes to make an apology. Such an impression was deliberately cultivated. It is a ruse. It is a lie. We are every bit as lost and afraid as children abandoned in a wood: every bit as lost as you.

~ Anders Nilsen

Lack of sound mind and judgement – the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions, is a matter of frustration and disillusionment to God

~ Sunday Adelaja

your facethrough the blurred visionof my disillusioned eyesmergeswith the rest of them.

~ Anna Jae

He tells me he can't believe how bitter he has become, how sour, that all his life he had been one of the most fun, one of the happiest, one of the most joyous people anyone knew, and now he was like a crumpled piece of steel covered in rust. The way he describes himself, a 'crumpled piece of steel covered in rust,' I don't think I'll ever forget those precise words or his voice as he said them.

~ Jacob Wren

Strike said Huh again, thinking about betrayal, about how everything and everybody were just so much smoke.

~ Richard Price

As long as my Duke remains unmarried some of the Great Houses can still hope for alliance.

~ Frank Herbert

How strange when an illusion dies. It's as though you've lost a child.

~ Judy Garland

She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.

~ D.h. Lawrence

They faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion.

~ Andrew Holleran

There are some things in this world you rely on, like a sure bet. And when they let you down, shifting from where you've carefully placed them, it shakes your faith, right where you stand.

~ Sarah Dessen

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fin

~ Gustave Flaubert

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 and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive. I looked at my love: that feeling which had been my master's --- which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like a suffering child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had seized it; it could not seek Mr Rochester's arms --- it could not derive warmth from his breast. Oh, never more could it turn to him; for faith was blighted -- confidence destroyed!

~ Charlotte Brontë

Personal disillusionment accompanied by self-pity and self-loathing are the Achilles’ heel of modern humankind, representing the weakness of the human spirit.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster