Kathryn Lasky Quotes

Sorcerers are convinced that all of us are a bunch of nincompoops. We can never relinquish our crummy control voluntarily, thus we have to be tricked

Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can covered a battered old four-slice toaster with a knitted cozy featuring images of kittens.

The truth is what I make it. I could set this world on fire and call it rain.

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.

There is not a physicist in the world who can perceive when a parlor magician palms off playing-cards.

In Hollywood, lying is something that people do like breathing.

In the essence of truth lies deceit.

We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.

Half-truths are the devil's IOUs.

The American people are free to do exactly what they are told.

The worst situations in the world always start with the words, 'trust me.'

There's one thing I've always known: You can let people suspect anything else about you, but you must never let them suspect you of knowing what you're doing.

A picture is an artificial work, outside nature. It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime.

The world is nothing but a big gimmick.

If we agree that the world is not what it seems, then we have an important question: What shall we do about it?

Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.

There's strong men of wisdom in many different fields. They say 5% of the people are wise and righteous and 10% are wise but use their wiseness for wickedness or to deceive others. It's like a magician: he knows the answer to the trick, but you don't. He has to keep you blind to the truth in order for the illusion to work. When you've got that kind of wisdom and somebody else doesn't, you can always take advantage of them.

There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom.

Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived.

Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.

Unbelievable," I said. "First you wanted to hide her away to keep you alive. Now you actually want her out in the world to use her compulsion for your own psycho plans.

Playing with appearances and mastering the arts of deception are among the aesthetic pleasures of life. They are also key components in the acquisition of power.

Magic is the cheat codes for the world.

Truth does not do as much good in the world as its imitations do harm.

It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.