Phantasm Quotes

Somewhere in his heart he had recognized who she was. His dominant wish, however, was to go a little longer without recognizing her. The woman's face floating in its dark seclusion, no name yet attached to it, had the character of a mysterious, lovely apparition. It was like the scent of the fragrant olive which, as one walks along a path at night, tells of the blossoms before one sees them. Isao wanted to keep things just as they were, if only for an instant more. At this moment a woman was a woman, not someone with a name attached to her.

And that was not all. Because of her hidden name, because of the agreement not to speak that name, she was transmuted into a marvelous essence, like a moonflower, its supporting vine invisible, floating high up in the darkness. This essence which preceded existence, this phantasm which preceded reality, this portent which preceded the event conveyed with unmistakable force the presence of a substance yet more powerful. This presence which showed itself as gliding through air - this was woman.

Isao had yet to embrace a woman. Still, never so strongly at this moment, when he keenly sensed this "womanliness that preceded woman," had he felt that he too knew what ecstasy meant. For this was a presence that he could even now embrace. In time, that is, it had drawn near with an exquisite subtlety, and in space it was only a little distant. The affectionate emotion that filled his breast was like a vapor that could envelop h ~ Yukio Mishima

That mountain there! That cloud there! What is 'real' about those? Try taking away the phantasm and the entire human
contribution, you sober realists! Yes, if only you could do that! If you could forget your heritage, your past, your training – your entire humanity and animality! For us there is no 'reality' – nor for you either, you sober ones. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life's setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we've stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won't be more than this nothingness. ~ Fernando Pessoa

O sun, heart of the heavens whose blood of light
Infuses the vigor which transmutes to azure
The black ice strangler of great space obscure
I hate you, mask of gold, mist and fire, circular
Blind monster blinding all the prey around
You who veil the impure dazzling phantasm
To the loving vertigo of my avid gazes
The visions of the colorless abyss of the void
Reversed hollow truth-mask of the other world. ~ Roger Gilbert-Lecomte

But there is no truth except truth in relation, and heavenly relation is composed of wheels in motion, tilting axes, turning dials; it is a clockwork orchestration that alters every minute, never repeating, never still. We are no longer sheltered in a cloistered reminiscence of the past. We now look outward, through the phantasm of our own convictions: we see the world as we wish to perfect it, and we imagine dwelling there. ~ Eleanor Catton

The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect. ~ Henry Adams

Why squander all that love on a phantasm when there seems too little love to go around on Earth as it is? Better ~ Irvin D. Yalom

We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies. ~ Charles Lamb

Phantasm, a pink-palmed jinn, a ghost from one of the drowned cities. ~ Diana Abu-Jaber

Being unable to retrace our steps in Time, we decided to move forward in Space. Shall we never be able to glide back up the stream of Time, and peep into the old home, and gaze on the old faces? Perhaps when the phonograph and the kinesigraph are perfected, and some future worker has solved the problem of colour photography, our descendants will be able to deceive themselves with something very like it: but it will be but a barren husk, a soulless phantasm and nothing more. "Oh for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still!" - Wordsworth Donisthorpe, inventor of the kinesigraph camera ~ Catherynne M Valente

This world may be a phantasm and existence may be merely a dream, but this dream or phantasm to me is real enough if using reason well we are never deceived by it. ~ Michio Kaku

Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky; their intimacy did not rest merely on champagne. Levin had been the friend and companion of his early youth. They were fond of one another in spite of the difference of their characters and tastes, as friends are fond of one another who have been together in early youth. But in spite of this, each of them - as is often the way with men who have selected careers of different kinds - though in discussion he would even justify the other's career, in his heart despised it. It seemed to each of them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere phantasm. Oblonsky could not restrain a slight mocking smile at the sight of Levin. How often he had seen him come up to Moscow from the country where he was doing something, but what precisely Stepan Arkadyevitch could never quite make out, and indeed he took no interest in the matter. Levin arrived in Moscow always excited and in a hurry, rather ill at ease and irritated by his own want of ease, and for the most part with a perfectly new, unexpected view of things. Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed at this, and liked it. In the same way Levin in his heart despised the town mode of life of his friend, and his official duties, which he laughed at, and regarded as trifling. But the difference was that Oblonsky, as he was doing the same as every one did, laughed complacently and good-humoredly, while Levin laughed without complacency and sometimes angrily ~ Leo Tolstoy

Secret Door"

Fools on parade cavort and carry on
For waiting eyes
That you would rather be beside than in front of
But she's never been the kind to be hollowed by the stares

She swam out of tonight's phantasm
Grabbed my hand and made it very clear
There's absolutely nothing for us here
It's a magnolia celebration
To be attempted on a Wednesday night
It's better than to get a reputation
As a miserable little tyke
At least that's the conclusion
She came to in this overture

The secret door swings behind us
She's saying nothing
She's just giggling along

Her arms were folded most indignant
Not looking like she was soon to leave
I had to squint in order to believe
And then like a butler pushing on a bookshelf
I'm unveiling the unexpected
I, who was earlier reluctant, was suddenly embarrassed and corrected
How could such a creature
Survive in such a habitat

The secret door swings behind us
She's saying nothing
She's just giggling along
And even if they were to find us
I wouldn't notice, I'm completely occupied

At all the fools on parade
Cavort and carry on for waiting eyes
That you would rather be beside than in front of
But she's never been the kind
To be hollowed by the stares
Fools on parade
Frolic and fuck about to make her gaze
Turn to a scribble on a page by a ~ Arctic Monkey's

Man's poverty is abysmal, his wants are endless till he becomes truly conscious of his soul. Till then, the world to him is in a state of flux - a phantasm that is and is not. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs ... In fact, the Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.
[Letter to James Smith discussing Jefferson's hate of the doctrine of the Christian trinity, December 8 1822] ~ Thomas Jefferson

But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, and yet to blind it, lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavor to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

We dream - it is good we are dreaming - It would hurt us - were we awake - But since it is playing - kill us, And we are playing - shriek - What harm? Men die - externally - It is a truth - of Blood - But we - are dying in Drama - And Drama - is never dead - Cautious - We jar each other - And either - open the eyes - Lest the Phantasm - prove the Mistake - And the livid Surprise Cool us to Shafts of Granite - With just an Age - and Name - And perhaps a phrase in Egyptian - It's prudenter - to dream - ~ Emily Dickinson

Thou doubtest because thou lovest the truth. Some would willingly believe life but a phantasm, if only it might for ever afford them a world of pleasant dreams: thou art not of such! Be content for a while not to know surely. The hour will come, and that ere long, when, being true, thou shalt behold the very truth, and doubt will be for ever dead. Scarce, then, wilt thou be able to recall the features of the phantom. Thou wilt then know that which thou canst not now dream. Thou hast not yet looked the Truth in the face, hast as yet at best but seen him through a cloud. That which thou seest not, and never didst see save in a glass darkly - that which, indeed, never can be known save by its innate splendour shining straight into pure eyes - that thou canst not but doubt, and art blameless in doubting until thou seest it face to face, when thou wilt no longer be able to doubt it. ~ George MacDonald

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. ~ Henry James

It may be, after all," said the Student Anselmus to himself, "that the superfine stomachic liqueur, which I took somewhat freely in Monsieur Conradi's, might really be the cause of all these shocking phantasms, which tortured me so at Archivarius Lindhorst's door. ~ E.T.A. Hoffmann

Ethics is a dream, and tenderness a daytime phantasm, lost when night comes. ~ Charles Baxter

We must come to grief and regret anyway - and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities. ~ A.S. Byatt

Yes, people will tell us they believe in a "God of love." But they are self-deceived, and their lives reveal it. They neither love Him with heart, soul, mind, and strength in return, nor do they worship Him with zeal and energy. The truth is that their mantra "My God is a God of love" is a smokescreen, a phantasm of their imagination. Underneath it all is a deep mistrust of God - otherwise, why not yield the whole of life in joyful abandon to whatever He says or asks? ~ Sinclair B. Ferguson

Hypocrisy - in other words, the practice of lying about lying - shields us from seeing ourselves as we are: a collocation of fragments that fit together as a biological unit but not as anything else, not as that ghost which has been called a self, a phantasm whose ecotoplasmic unreality we can never see through. By staying true to the lie of the self, the ego, we can hold onto the illusion that we will be who we are all our lives and not see our selves die a thousand times before our death. While some have dedicated themselves to getting to the bottom of how these parts create the illusion of a whole, this is not how pyramids are built. To get a pyramid off the ground takes a lot of ego - the base material of those stacks of stones that tourists visit while on vacation. Of course, a pyramid is actually a polyhedron, that is, a mathematical conception which pyramids in the physical world resemble . . . at least from a distance. The nearer one gets to a pyramid, the more it reveals itself to be what it is: a roughly pyramidal conglomeration of bricks, a composition of fragments that is not what it seems to be. This is also how it works with humans. The world around us encourages the build up of our egos - those pyramids of self-esteem - as if we needed such encouragement. Although everyone is affected by this pyramid scheme, some participate in it more than others: they are observably more full of themselves and tend to their egos as they would exotic plants in a hothouse. It h ~ Thomas Ligotti