Palace Of Illusions Quotes

But Krishna was a chameleon. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

'The Mahabharata,' which inspired my novel 'Palace of Illusions,' also has many stories embedded within the main tale. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

No further use now for this language, this learning, this whole education through which I was taught to exert myself at the heart of the world. Mirage or mirror, a great enchantment glows in this darkness and leans against the door-jam of ravages in the classic pose assumed by death immediately after shedding her shroud. O my image of bone, here I am: let everything finally decompose in the palace of illusions and silence. ~ Louis Aragon

Oh Florence, Florence, patroness
of the lovely tyrannicides!
Where the tower of the Old Palace
pierces the sky
like a hypodermic needle,
Perseus, David and Judith,
lords and ladies of the Blood,
Greek demi-gods of the Cross,
rise sword in hand
above the unshaven
formless decapitation
of the monsters, tubs of guts,
mortifying chunks for the pack.
Pity the monsters!
Pity the monsters!
Perhaps, one always took the wrong side -
Ah, to have known, to have loved
too many David and Judiths!
My heart bleeds for the monster.
I have seen the Gorgon.
The erotic terror
of her helpless, big-bosomed body
lay like slop.
Wall-eyed, staring the despot to stone,
her severed head swung
like a lantern in the victor's hand. ~ Robert Lowell

A KING WHO PLACED MIRRORS IN HIS PALACE

There lived a king; his comeliness was such
The world could not acclaim his charm too much.
The world's wealth seemed a portion of his grace;
It was a miracle to view his face.
If he had rivals,then I know of none;
The earth resounded with this paragon.
When riding through his streets he did not fail
To hide his features with a scarlet veil.
Whoever scanned the veil would lose his head;
Whoever spoke his name was left for dead,
The tongue ripped from his mouth; whoever thrilled
With passion for this king was quickly killed.
A thousand for his love expired each day,
And those who saw his face, in blank dismay
Would rave and grieve and mourn their lives away-
To die for love of that bewitching sight
Was worth a hundred lives without his light.
None could survive his absence patiently,
None could endure this king's proximity-
How strange it was that man could neither brook
The presence nor the absence of his look!
Since few could bear his sight, they were content
To hear the king in sober argument,
But while they listened they endure such pain
As made them long to see their king again.
The king commanded mirrors to be placed
About the palace walls, and when he faced
Their polished surfaces his image shone
With mitigated splendour to the throne.

If you would glimpse the beauty we r ~ Attar Of Nishapur

And when I fall in love," I began, "I will build a mountain to touch the sky. Then, my lover and I will have the best of both worlds, reality firmly under our feet, while we have our heads in the clouds with all our illusions still intact. And the purple grass will grow all around, high enough to reach our eyes. ~ V.C. Andrews

I get in where I fit in but it's lonely at the top o where else is there to go? literacy of spirituality, give ear as it flows. Mind is mine and is a 5 star general, complex contrasted from the common in general. I sit in my palace because of the knowledge I have is about the average. Read in between the lines as I hit in between the eyes, open the third one that will give you wings to fly. ~ Jose R. Coronado

They were tough and sour, but as Pushkin said, 'Dearer to us than a host of truths is an exalting illusion.' I saw a happy man, whose cherished dream had so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, had gotten what he wanted, who was content with his fate and with himself. For some reason there had always been something sad mixed with my thoughts about human happiness, but now, at the sight of a happy man, I was overcome by an oppressive feeling close to despair.
- Gooseberries ~ Anton Chekhov

She had no magical ability, so the face he gazed into carried no illusions. She'd never tried to be anything but what she was, for him or anyone else. She was thirty-two years old, and looked ten years older. Born on the coast, raised in the interior, burned at the front, a woman who was alive only because behind her was a long line of dead men. And women. ~ Kameron Hurley

Subhuti, someone might fill innumerable worlds with the seven treasures and give all away in gifts of alms, but if any good man or any good woman awakens the thought of Enlightenment and takes even only four lines from this Discourse, reciting, using, receiving, retaining and spreading them abroad and explaining them for the benefit of others, it will be far more meritorious. Now in what manner may he explain them to others? By detachment from appearances-abiding in Real Truth. -So I tell you-
Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightening in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
When Buddha finished this Discourse the venerable Subhuti, together with the bhikshus, bhikshunis, lay-brothers and sisters, and the whole realms of Gods, Men and Titans, were filled with joy by His teaching, and, taking it sincerely to heart they went their ways. ~ Gautama Buddha

Long distance running is meditation. When I finish a long run, it's like my brain has been washed. All the stress and negative thoughts are left somewhere on those long kilometers. At the end, the illusions of the past and future are removed from my mind, and it is set back to zero, so I feel I am totally in the present moment, reset, and ready to restart my life afresh. ~ Robert Black

The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Patterned after an Italian Renaissance palace, it is 88 times as large and one millionth as valuable to the continuation of man. that Pentagon of traveling salesmen. ~ Norman Mailer

Let dissolution come when it will, it can do the Christian no harm, for it will be but a passage out of a prison into a palace; out of a sea of troubles into a haven of rest; out of a crowd of enemies, to an innumerable company of true, loving, and faithful friends; out of shame, reproach, and contempt, into exceeding great and eternal glory. ~ John Bunyan

Here in this old palace, untouched by the winds of change, here maybe some magic happens, for a little while. But the day must come when she will walk the road across the lake, and on that day, in the sad, heartless world on the other shore, you know it cannot last she is a slave. ~ John Speed

You teach best what you most need to learn. - RICHARD BACH, ILLUSIONS: THE ADVENTURES OF A RELUCTANT MESSIAH ~ Lisa B. Marshall

We lost not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety
and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it would always be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal. ~ Judith Viorst

It was the duty of philosophy to destroy the illusions which had their origin in misconceptions, whatever darling hopes and valued expectations may be ruined by its explanations. ~ Immanuel Kant

running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors. The thought that his father's death had made no difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper. "Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, springing ~ Edith Wharton

For a man's life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness. ~ Anatole France

Some of my best friends are illusions. Been sustaining me for years. ~ Sheila Ballantyne

Possession, it is true, crowns exertion with rest; but it is only in the illusions of fancy that it has power to charm us. ~ Wilhelm Von Humboldt

The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions. ~ Ernest Becker

Think of Chicago as a piece of music, perhaps," he continued. "In it you can hear the thousands of years of people living here and fishing and hunting, and then bullets and axes, and the whine of machinery, and the bellowing of cattle, and the shriek of railroads, and the thud of fists and staves and crowbars, and a hundred languages, a thousand dialects. And the murmur of the lake like a basso undertone. Ships and storms, snow and fire. To the north the vast dark forests, and everywhere else around the city rolling fields of farms, and all roads leading to Chicago, which rises from the plains like Oz, glowing with light and fire at night, drawing people to it from around the world. A roaring city, gunfire and applause and thunder. Gleaming but made of bone and stone. Bitter cold and melting hot and clotheslines hung in the alleys and porches like the webbing of countless spiders. A city without illusions but with vaulting imaginations and expectations. A city of burning energies on the shore of a huge northern sea. An American city, with all the violence and humor and grace and greed of this particular powerful adolescent country. Perhaps the American city - no other city in the nation is as big and central and grown up from the very soil. Chicago was never ruled by Spain or England or France or Russia or Texas, it shares no ocean with other countries, it is no mere regional captain, like Cincinnati or Nashville; it is itself, all brawn and greed and song, brilliant and vena ~ Brian Doyle

America is a post-Christian nation only in the sense that we have built a tenement on the foundation of a palace. ~ Ron Brackin

wouldn't a loving gather, I reasoned, have more compassion than to seek revenge on His comparatively feeble children who are temporarily blinded by the illusions of time and space? ~ Mike Dooley

He was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope's pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar: without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue; if ever any man had the right to say that he ruled by the right divine, it was Mohammed, for he had all the power without its instruments and without its supports. He cared not for the dressings of power. The simplicity of his private life was in keeping with his public life. ~ R. Bosworth Smith

Divinity is accident of nature, magic is the work of an art. ~ Amit Kalantri

Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I try hard to look at that girl in the mirror,
To tell her not to give up.
Maybe if she had a better image of herself
she wouldn't be so lost in her illusions.
Maybe if she had a better image of herself
she wouldn't give society a chance to name her.
Maybe if she had a better image of herself
she wouldn't give herself another name. ~ Mi-ran Isaacs

For those particular illusions there may well have been a past; it is problematic, however, if there is now much of a future. ~ Sigmund Freud

…the abstract geometrics spasming across the TV screen are settling into a deep crystalline blue, the same as the color from her implant's diagnostics, which somehow seems natural, as though her history pervaded everything, and the world were the palace of her memory ~ Zachary Mason

Without illusions. I love you because you are
fallible and because your poor misguided testosterone-corrupted brain has you doing cartwheels
trying not to be. I love you because of all you are and because of all you're not. And because, no
matter what, you are all the man I'll ever need. ~ Cindy Gerard

Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves. ~ Albert Einstein