Believable Illusion
February 2012
89 posts
«The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seems natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear…»
- Isabel Allende
«Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering.»
- Paulo Coelho
«You’ll find the shame is like the pain: you only feel it once.»
- Marquise de Merteuil, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
«I ended by falling on my knees and pledging her eternal love. And do you know that, at that time, and for several hours afterwards, I actually meant it.»
- Vicomte de Valmont, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
«When I came out into society I was 15. I already knew that the role I was condemned to, namely to keep quiet and do what I was told, gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe. Not to what people told me, which naturally was of no interest, but to whatever it was they were trying to hide. I practiced detachment. I learned how to look cheerful while under the table I stuck a fork into the back of my hand. I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn’t pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelists to see what I could get away with, and in the end, I distilled everything to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die».
- Marquise de Merteuil, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
