Phantasmagoria Quotes

“The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.”
― Walter Benjamin

“The Soup and the Clouds

My dear little mad beloved was serving my dinner, and I was looking out of the open dining room window contemplating those moving architectural marvels that God constructs out of mist, edifices of the impalpable. And as I looked I was saying to myself: “All those phantasmagoria are almost as beautiful as my beloved’s beautiful eyes, as the green eyes of my mad monstrous little beloved.”

All of a sudden I felt a terrible blow of a fist on my back and heard a husky and charming voice, an hysterical voice, a hoarse brandy voice, the voice of my dear little beloved, saying: “Aren’t you ever going to eat your soup, you damned bastard of a cloud-monger?”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“War stripped of its passions. its phantasms. its finery. its veils. its violence. its images; war stripped bare by its technicians even. and then reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics. as though with a second skin. But these too are a kind of decoy that technology sets up before itself. Saddam Hussein's decoys still aim to deceive the enemy. whereas the American
technological decoy only aims to deceive itself. The first days of the lightning attack. dominated by this technological mystification. will remain one of the finest bluffs. one of the finest collective mirages of contemporary History (along with Timisoara). We are all accomplices in these fantasmagoria. it must be said, as we are in any publicity campaign. In the past. the unemployed constituted the reserve army of Capital; today. in our enslavement to information. we constitute the reserve army of all planetary mystifications.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

“Don't fall in love with me. I am not one entity. I am a multitude of phantasmagorical entities. I am the poet. I am the writer. I am the wanderer. I am the philosopher. I am the king. I am the beggar. I am the drifter. I am the hunter. I am the creator. I am the creation. I worship my gods - Bukowski, Kafka, Hemingway, Rand & Plath. I listen to my gods - Beethoven, Mozart, & Tchaikovsky! Don't fall in love with me! I am not one entity. I am a multitude of phastamagorical entities.”
― Avijeet Das