Disillusionment Quotes

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“All knowledge hurts.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

“Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.”
― George Carlin

“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, Someone Like You

“Life is not a song, sweetling.
Someday you may learn that, to your sorrow.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Dreaming about being an actress, is more exciting then being one.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers."

(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“There's truths you have to grow into.”
― H.G. Wells, Love and Mr. Lewisham

“When you once see something as false which you have accepted as true, as natural, as human, then you can never go back to it.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“All my misfortunes come of having thought too well of my fellows.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“You are very harsh.'
'I have seen the world.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“How strange when an illusion dies. It's as though you've lost a child.”
― Judy Garland

“Nostalgia is an illness
for those who haven't realized
that today
is tomorrow's nostalgia.”
― Zeena Schreck

“Once the dust of volcanic love has settled and the harshness of a new reality has become oppressive, disillusionment may have to be mended, wounds to be healed and emotional fallouts to be taken care of, mindfully ( "Is that all there is ?")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

“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, The Last Vampire

“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 Bronte, Jane Eyre

“[T]he useful idiots, the leftists who are idealistically believing in the beauty of the Soviet socialist or Communist or whatever system, when they get disillusioned, they become the worst enemies. That’s why my KGB instructors specifically made the point: never bother with leftists. Forget about these political prostitutes. Aim higher. [...] They serve a purpose only at the stage of destabilization of a nation. For example, your leftists in the United States: all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders. They are instrumental in the process of the subversion only to destabilize a nation. When their job is completed, they are not needed any more. They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxist-Leninists come to power—obviously they get offended—they think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.”
― Yuri Bezmenov

“There are too many other inexplicable things around us--horrors, threats, mysteries that draw you in and then inevitably disenchant you. Back to the predictable and humdrum. The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty's dead.”
― Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned

“I'm too old to know everything”
― Oscar Wilde

“When you lose your parents as a child, you are indoctrinated into a club, you re taken into life's severest confidence. You are undeceived.”
― Hilary Thayer Hamann, Anthropology of an American Girl

“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, The Go-Between

“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, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood---a flood of what I realized I did not know. Afterward, I would mourn her as if she'd died, because something had: someone we had created together.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Love is a fake!” Olson was blaring. “There are three great truths in the world and they are a good meal, a good screw, and a good shit, and that’s all!”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk