“Illusion is the mantle of the Real”

Source: Lady of Mazes (2005), Chapter 17 (p. 183).

Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 9 (p. 78)

Network (1976)
Context: You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion!

Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

As quoted in Federalism and the French Canadians (1968) by Pierre Trudeau, p. 175

"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."

Enlightenment
Song lyrics, Enlightenment (1990)

First Week, First Day. Compare: "Come civil night,… with thy black mantle", William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, act iii. sc. 2.
La Semaine; ou, Création du monde (1578)

45
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)