Hallucination Quotes

“Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Actually, I do happen to resemble a hallucination. Kindly note my silhouette in the moonlight." The cat climbed into the shaft of moonlight and wanted to keep talking but was asked to be quiet. "Very well, I shall be silent," he replied, "I shall be a silent hallucination.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can make one feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly being unraveled. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a balanced grip on one's own being. The mind swells out to fill the entire landscape, becoming so diffuse in the process that one loses the ability to keep it fastened to the physical self. The sun would rise from the eastern horizon, and cut it's way across the empty sky, and sink below the western horizon. This was the only perceptible change in our surroundings. And in the movement of the sun, I felt something I hardly know how to name: some huge, cosmic love.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.”
― William Hazlitt

“A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.”
― Terence McKenna

“And then, well... He might have slept for a bit. He rather hoped he was sleeping, because he was quite certain he’d seen a six-foot rabbit hopping through his bedchamber, and if that wasn’t a dream, they were all in very big trouble.

Although really, it wasn’t the rabbit that was so dangerous as much as the giant carrot he was swinging about like a mace.

That carrot would feed an entire village.”
― Julia Quinn, Just Like Heaven

“Some time later there was a knock at his door. He was surprised to find it was now evening and the room was quite dark. The knock sounded again. The landlord was at the door. The landlord began to talk, but Strange could not understand him. This was because the man had a pineapple in his mouth. How he had managed to cram the whole thing in there, Strange could not imagine. Green, spiky leaves emerged slowly out of his mouth and then were sucked back in again as he spoke. Strange wondered if perhaps he ought to go and fetch a knife or a hook and try and fish the pineapple out, in case the landlord should choke. But at the same time he did not care much about it. 'After all,' he thought with some irritation, 'it is his own fault. He put it there.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

“I am having a hallucination now, I don't need drugs for that.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“I believe there'snothingin hallucinations that has anything to do with anything external to the internal psychological state of the person who's got the hallucination.”
― Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“Osiris, to go directly to the important part of this, was not a" dying god, "not" life caught in the spell of death, "or" a dead god, "as modern interpreters have said. He was the hallucinated voice of a dead king whose admonitions could still carry weight. And since he could still be heard, there is no paradox in the fact that the body from which the voice once came should be mummified, with all the equipment of the tomb providing life's necessities: food, drink, slaves, women, the lot. There was no mysterious power that emanated from him; simply his remembered voice which appeared in hallucination to those who had known him and which could admonish or suggest even as it has before he stopped moving and breathing. And that various natural phenomena such as the whispering of waves could act as the cue for such hallucinations accounts for the belief that Osiris, or the king whose body has ceased to move and is in his mummy cloths, continues to control the flooding of the Nile. Further, the relationship between Horus and Osiris, 'embodied' in each new king and his dead father forever, can only be understood as the assimilation of an hallucinated advising voice into the king's own voice, which then would be repeated with the next generation.”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“When a schizophrenic patient sees things that others don’t see, he at least knows that his mind is playing with him. But your hallucinations, which you call reality. are being validated and strengthened by everything and everyone around you.”
― Shunya

“Night was close. Black trees towered over the dimly lit horizon like cloaked guardians. The winds rocked their crown and their heads tilted, like a nod, begging him over. He wanted to join them. Desperately. He longed for a friend as precious and pure. With the next gust of wind, their bodies seemed to grow, arching over the slumbering town, watching like a curious visitor. There was nobody outside, but some homes were still lit. A tiny speck of brightness that broke the trees’ black figures with an orange hue forming near the roots. The winds jerked and pulled, and for a moment, it looked like their roots were a prison. And that even comfort, nourishment, life itself, was worth escaping.”
― Mieke Leenders

“Man is a hostage to the cage of cultural programming and the mass hallucination of the propagandist’s narrative illusion.”
― James Scott, Senior Fellow, The Center for Cyber Influence Operations Studies

“Normality may be a hallucination, but it's a collective trip, and it takes a lot of energy to come down.”
― Alexa Tsoulis-Reay, Finding Normal: Sex, Love, and Taboo in Our Hyperconnected World

“If you were transported 500 years back in time and told them about mobile phones, they would call you mad and kill you. Even if you are an engineer, you wouldn’t be able to prove to them that mobile phones are real. They only understand clay and fire.


Today when people say they can see things that you can’t see, you call them mentally ill. Don’t disregard experiences of others no matter how different they are from yours. Space-Time is infinite. Even things you can’t imagine exist inside it.”
― Shunya

“If he bleeds to death on the pavilion floor, will he truly have died? Or will the web-work of mosquito curtains draw up into the heavens, amid thunderous applause, and his comrades lift him by the arms? Will the sick, lame, and the dying walk again, missing limbs restored? Will the dead enter from the wings to take a bow?”
― Dennis McFarland, Nostalgia

“In 1934, Bill W., cofounder of AA [Alcoholics Anonymous], was treated for his alcoholism with a hallucinogenic belladonna alkaloid. The resulting mystical experience led him to become sober and inspired him to write the book and cofound the organization that have changed the lives of so many millions around the world. In the 1950's Bill W underwent LSD therapy, and found his experience so inspiring that the sought to have the drug made part of the AA program.”
― Ayelet Waldman, A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life

“[writing in his notebook]
'The statue sang, I could hear it distinctly though I failed to interpret the words of the song. It was all a hallucination of course. Otherwise nothing worth noting today'
[he moves on]”
― Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt

“The lion on the left had advanced all the way to the fence now; its muzzle was touching the boards. It seemed to be grinning at him. Jack backed up another two steps. His head was thudding crazily and he could feel the dry rasp of his breath in his throat. Now the buffalo had moved, circling to the right, behind and around the rabbit. The head was lowered, the green hedge horns pointing at him. The thing was, you couldn't watch all of them. Not all at once.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“There is no reality, there is only hallucination. Reality is hallucination we agree on.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Karadeniz Chronicle: The Novel

“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Those who are not afraid of monsters tend not to leave descendants.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“In the doorway stood a figure, light forming a halo around his head.

He isn’t really there,
Tom told himself.
You’re hallucinating.
If he could split into different parts that talked to each other, perhaps one of them had gone to the door.

‘Major Fox?’ it enquired.

So polite, this hallucination.”
― Jack Grimwood, Moskva

“Like every illusion, fiction is one of the innumerable parts of reality.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Picture a man in his living room. He is standing at a closed window opposite the fireplace and looking out at the dark night. As the fire starts to burn, the images of the objects in the room behind him can be seen reflected dimly in the window. As more logs burn and the fire in the fireplace illuminates the room, the man now sees a vivid reflection of himself and the contents of the room, which appears to be outside the window. As the analogy is applied to intoxication, the window is the window of our senses to the world, the fire is the electrical excitation in the brain, and the logs are the drugs that dampen (sedatives) or stoke up (stimulants and hallucinogens) the fire. When the fire is stifled, the man will see very little. But when the fire burns brightly, the glass will reflect the furniture in the rooms of his mind—his images, memories, dreams, and fantasies. The brighter the fire—the more [drugs] in the brain—the more vivid the reflections become until some users step through the window, like Alice going through the looking glass, and behave as if the images were real.”
― Ronald K. Siegel, Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances

“The good thing about carrying on a conversation with a phantom voice projected by some fragment of your shattered subconscious is, you can brush your teeth at the same time.”
― Eddie Robson, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words

“There is a thin line between a vision and a hallucination in politics.”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, Yet Another New Land

“How do you control your mind? How do you find a middle between truth and delusion? It may interest you that if you go too far on truth, you may get disappointed in God, in your life, in any beliefs, and even in your mother that gave birth to you. But what if you go too far on delusion?" He stopped and made a thoughtful face. Precop continued, "If you go too far on delusion, you will go crazy and find the darkest hell inside of your inner mind, provided by your own mind. I've been there, trust me. It is so dark that till now I am not sure if you're real or I am just talking to myself.”
― Veronica Braila, Blue House: Ten Years on The Way Home

“Stop that noise, you’ll wake the dead. Get back to mixing those egg whites before I poke a hole right through you!” said Cook, before disappearing through another door. Sarah slumped to the scrubbed kitchen table. My headache must be worse than I thought; now I’m hallucinating. - Fifteen Postcards, Kirsten McKenzie”
― Kirsten McKenzie

“A good and learned psychotherapist considers and digs into all factors in the context of physical, spiritual, political, and investigation in all dimensions before the decision. Mental disorders, illusions, delusions, and such terms may not always be physical issues; they can be real; they can be the process of spirituality; they can be the result of chemicals as a patient feels and realizes rather than mental or physical. Most psychotherapists are just like robots and professional bookworms and have no other subjects’ knowledge.

Whether delusion, illusion, hallucination, or mirage that carries a similar context as there is truth and also no truth: If you exemplify mirage, no doubt when a layer of water appears in a desert or on a warm road and causes the light to refract through the heat of the sun is truth, but a layer of water is truthless. Light exists, not a layer of water; it is a lack of knowledge, not a mental issue. Psychotherapists cannot treat a lack of knowledge with drugs. If they remain unable to understand it, of course, they also have a lack of knowledge.”
― Ehsan Sehgal