“Tryin' to get control,
Pressure's takin' its toll.
Stuck in the middle zone,
I just want you alone.
My guessing game is strong,
Way too real to be wrong.
Caught up in your show,
Yeah, at least now I know.It wasn't love, it wasn't love,
It was a perfect illusion (Perfect illusion).
Mistaken for love, it wasn't love,
It was a perfect illusion (Perfect illusion).
You were a perfect illusion.”

"About the screenplay for Strangers on a Train" (notes, 1950), first published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962), section "Chandler on the Film World and Television", p. 134
Context: When you read a story, you accept its implausibilities and extravagances, because they are no more fantastic than the conventions of the medium itself. But when you look at real people, moving against a real background, and hear them speaking real words, your imagination is anaesthetized. You accept what you see and hear, but you do not complement it from the resources of your own imagination. The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.

"Queen of the Black Coast" (1934)
Source: Conan the Barbarian Omnibus -The Original Stories
Context: He shrugged his shoulders. "I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."

Source: Bitten

Sam Harris, Adventures in the Land of Illness http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/adventures-in-the-land-of-illness (May 26, 2014)
2010s

Source: Bloody Valentine

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)

Acis, in Pt. V
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)