There were married couples looking domestic and bored with each other in the midst of their travels; there were small parties and large parties, and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting boisterously, but all thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as was their wont at home; and just as intelligently receptive of new impressions as their trunks upstairs. Hence forth they would be labeled as having passed through this and that place, and so would be their luggage. They would cherish this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed tickets on their port manteaus as documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace of their improving enterprise.

-Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

'Is it true,' she said, 'that England is like a dream?...She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up.'
'Well,' I answered annoyed, 'that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.'
'But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?'
'And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?'
'More easily,' she said, 'much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a dream.'
'No, this is the unreal and like a dream,' I thought.

-Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Sometimes I can't help the feeling that I'm
Living a life of illusion
And oh, why can't we let it be
And see thru the hole in this wall of confusion
I just can't help the feeling I'm
Living a life of illusion

Pow! Right between the eyes
Oh, how nature loves her little surprises
Wow! It all seems so logical now
It's just one of her better disguises
And it comes with no warning
Nature loves her little surprises
Continual crisis

Hey, don't you know it's a waste of your day
Caught up in endless solutions
That have no meaning, just another hunch
Based upon jumping conclusions
Caught up in endless solutions
Backed up against a wall of confusion
Living a life of illusion.

-Joe Walsh, "Life of Illusion"

It was a strange and melancholy illusion, ordered half-consciously like all our illusions, which I suspect only to be visions of remote unattainable truth, seen dimly. This was, indeed, one of the lost, forgotten, unknown places of the earth; I had looked under its obscure surface; and I felt that when tomorrow I had left it forever, it would slip out of existence to live only in my memory till I myself passed into oblivion. I have that feeling about me now; perhaps it is that feeling which has incited me to tell you the story, to try and hand over to you, as it were, its very existence, its reality – the truth, disclosed in a moment of illusion.

-Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim