escape

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
b3dadaf	Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.	escape freedom reality intoxication	Anaïs Nin
3707f62	To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.	escape reading books life good-habits refuge pleasure	W. Somerset Maugham
9a1da5b	Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.	escape reading	David Mitchell
5f86d1e	Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.	burroughs escape change inspirational	William S. Burroughs
9e5af99	To escape death, she'd become death.	escape	Sarah J. Maas
2df2a94	But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.	solitude loneliness escape relationship fear love community	Bell Hooks
70a0a22	Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.	escape mind life inspirational	Virginia Woolf
6aaef7d	The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.	escape church	John Steinbeck
86d50bd	Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from -- hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further . He was fascinated.	theatre escape escapism human-nature	Terry Pratchett
de7bee1	Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women. It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.	escape women humor eve paradise sarcasm	Oscar Wilde
ac95af4	To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative -- the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.	escape reading fiction interpretation real-world narrative escapism storytelling	Umberto Eco
3268e45	Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically -- any way you want to look at it -- everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.	escape hopes dreams southern-california transience restlessness los-angeles escapism nightmares	Michael Connelly
e429bc3	You're trying to escape from your difficulties, and there never is any escape from difficulties, never. They have to be faced and fought.	escape facing-problems fight	Enid Blyton
1c9ce2a	Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.	escape	David Mitchell
4c9bf80	"There is no such thing as freedom on earth," he said. "Only different kinds of bondages. And comparative bondages. YOU think you are free now because you've escaped from a peculiarly unbreakable kind of bondage. But are you? You love me - THAT'S a bondage."	escape freedom love	L.M. Montgomery
afab4ba	But I can now understand why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's ok to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings, the book closes, and I'm plunged back into reality.	escape reading flawed relatable	Cecelia Ahern
508a4ca	Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.	escape freedom religion individual west purpose obedience	D.H. Lawrence
d62922a	The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean -- once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.	escape preservation environment help society isolation	Jared Diamond
d9f220c	Escape is a commodity like anything else	escape	Iain M. Banks
8f1b560	I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.	live escape die thought	John Green
0cf1d1d	"I must apologize for calling so late," said he, "and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall."	escape doctor-watson late-visit scrambling unconventional sherlock-holmes	Arthur Conan Doyle
1b83f20	...to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.	sleep suicide earth escape depression sorrow fear mother misery terror horror	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
ed03b82	Leaving what is safe so you can be more, Derek said. The cage is what the bird knows; the sky is all the things he still wants to do even if it's a risk.	escape freedom	Ilona Andrews
644d694	Eve engaged her On Duty sign and stepped out of the car. Immediately her ears were assaulted with a blast of music. Christmas carols pumped, full blast, into the air. She decided that people ran inside, ready to buy anything, just to escape the noise.	escape eve-dallas	J.D. Robb
413af38	I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness.	escape introspection beat-generation	Allen Ginsberg
d998938	You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and M a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedoms swift winged angels, that fly around the world; I am confined in the bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that if I were on one of your gallant decks, under your protecting wing! Alas! Betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O, that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God! Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand. Get caught, or clear, I'll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing. Only think of it; 100 miles straight north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God is helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This is very bay shall yet bear me into freedom. The steamboats steered in the Northeast course from Northpoint. I will do the same; and when I get to the head of the bay, I will turn my canoe adrift, and walked straight through Delaware into Pennsylvania. When I get there, I shall not be required to have a pass; I can travel without being disturbed. Let but the first opportunity offer, and, come what will, I am off. Meanwhile, I will try to bear up under the yoke. I am not the only slave in the world. Why should I be free? I can bear as much as any of them. Besides I am but a boy, and all boys are bound to some one. It may be that my misery and slavery will only increase the happiness when I get free there is a better day coming. [62 - 63]	escape freedom	Frederick Douglass
f44e8f9	They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. But the man that is will shadow The man that pretends to be.	perfection escape goodness system shadow utopia	T.S. Eliot
02f1239	White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.	escape slavery death slaves whites race-relations	Colson Whitehead
d943e5a	The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.	escape freedom philosophy flee fleeing german-idealism	Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
6a905c4	For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.	solitude loneliness escape spirit fear hope london soul	Elizabeth von Arnim
798e95d	Deception' is the word I most associate with anorexia and the treachery which comes from falsehood. The illness appears inviting. It would seem to offer something to those unwary or unlucky enough to suffer from it - friendship, a get-out, or a haven - when, in fact, it is a trap.	illness escape false-friend haveb anorexia-nervosa falsehood treachery deception trap self-deception anorexia eating-disorder mental-illness	Carol Lee
2d019ed	Bosch had never liked Las Vegas, though he came often on cases. It shared a kinship with Los Angeles; both were places desperate people ran to. Often, when they ran from Los Angeles, they came here. It was the only place left.	escape las-vegas nevada los-angeles desperation	Michael Connelly
41ec6b0	Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have been wrong, but I was right.' If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it. I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become. She says suddenly, 'I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.' She holds out her hands. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scares, each about a centimeter long. The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top.	escape courage freedom captive escape-attempt fence gdr berlin-wall self-belief belief teenager wall scars dark-humor	Anna Funder
3c7370d	I came to this city to escape.	escape	Jeanette Winterson
1a8af3c	Despues de exigir mi marcha, ya no posees jurisdiccion en lo concerniente a mi salud.	escape alejamiento huida salud desamor	Salman Rushdie
b124c01	I thought of all the summer evenings I'd spent sitting in the chairs under the trees beside the trailer, reading books that helped me escape Creek View, at least for a little while. Magical kingdoms, Russian love triangles, and the March sisters couldn't have been further away from the trailer park.	escape reading books trailer trailer-park louisa-may-alcott little-women reading-quotes escape-from-reality love-of-reading books-reading love-of-books read	Heather Demetrios
374a2b7	Let me sleep at last. I've had misery enough in my life. You said there was nowhere to go to. There is death to go to. I've had misery enough in my life.	sleep escape desperate the-black-prince iris-murdoch suicidal misery	Iris Murdoch
28ddc31	Woe be to the wug who forgets that destroying one part of a thing does not equal victory	escape mystery-suspense	David Baldacci
46c3414	Running away from uncertainty and confusion but most of all running away from myself. I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.	escape life fleeing running	Jeanette Winterson

b3dadaf

Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

escape freedom reality intoxication

Anaïs Nin

3707f62

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

escape reading books life good-habits refuge pleasure

W. Somerset Maugham

9a1da5b

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

escape reading

David Mitchell

5f86d1e

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

burroughs escape change inspirational

William S. Burroughs

9e5af99

To escape death, she'd become death.

escape

Sarah J. Maas

2df2a94

But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

solitude loneliness escape relationship fear love community

Bell Hooks

70a0a22

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

escape mind life inspirational

Virginia Woolf

6aaef7d

The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.

escape church

John Steinbeck

86d50bd

Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from -- hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further . He was fascinated.

theatre escape escapism human-nature

Terry Pratchett

de7bee1

Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women. It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.

escape women humor eve paradise sarcasm

Oscar Wilde

ac95af4

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative -- the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

escape reading fiction interpretation real-world narrative escapism storytelling

Umberto Eco

3268e45

Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically -- any way you want to look at it -- everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.

escape hopes dreams southern-california transience restlessness los-angeles escapism nightmares

Michael Connelly

e429bc3

You're trying to escape from your difficulties, and there never is any escape from difficulties, never. They have to be faced and fought.

escape facing-problems fight

Enid Blyton

1c9ce2a

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.

escape

David Mitchell

4c9bf80

"There is no such thing as freedom on earth," he said. "Only different kinds of bondages. And comparative bondages. YOU think you are free now because you've escaped from a peculiarly unbreakable kind of bondage. But are you? You love me - THAT'S a bondage."

escape freedom love

L.M. Montgomery

afab4ba

But I can now understand why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's ok to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings, the book closes, and I'm plunged back into reality.

escape reading flawed relatable

Cecelia Ahern

508a4ca

Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.

escape freedom religion individual west purpose obedience

D.H. Lawrence

d62922a

The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean -- once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.

escape preservation environment help society isolation

Jared Diamond

d9f220c

Escape is a commodity like anything else

escape

Iain M. Banks

8f1b560

I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.

live escape die thought

John Green

0cf1d1d

"I must apologize for calling so late," said he, "and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall."

escape doctor-watson late-visit scrambling unconventional sherlock-holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle

1b83f20

...to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.

sleep suicide earth escape depression sorrow fear mother misery terror horror

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

ed03b82

Leaving what is safe so you can be more, Derek said. The cage is what the bird knows; the sky is all the things he still wants to do even if it's a risk.

escape freedom

Ilona Andrews

644d694

Eve engaged her On Duty sign and stepped out of the car. Immediately her ears were assaulted with a blast of music. Christmas carols pumped, full blast, into the air. She decided that people ran inside, ready to buy anything, just to escape the noise.

escape eve-dallas

J.D. Robb

413af38

I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness.

escape introspection beat-generation

Allen Ginsberg

d998938

You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and M a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedoms swift winged angels, that fly around the world; I am confined in the bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that if I were on one of your gallant decks, under your protecting wing! Alas! Betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O, that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God! Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand. Get caught, or clear, I'll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing. Only think of it; 100 miles straight north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God is helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This is very bay shall yet bear me into freedom. The steamboats steered in the Northeast course from Northpoint. I will do the same; and when I get to the head of the bay, I will turn my canoe adrift, and walked straight through Delaware into Pennsylvania. When I get there, I shall not be required to have a pass; I can travel without being disturbed. Let but the first opportunity offer, and, come what will, I am off. Meanwhile, I will try to bear up under the yoke. I am not the only slave in the world. Why should I be free? I can bear as much as any of them. Besides I am but a boy, and all boys are bound to some one. It may be that my misery and slavery will only increase the happiness when I get free there is a better day coming. [62 - 63]

escape freedom

Frederick Douglass

f44e8f9

They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. But the man that is will shadow The man that pretends to be.

perfection escape goodness system shadow utopia

T.S. Eliot

02f1239

White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.

escape slavery death slaves whites race-relations

Colson Whitehead

d943e5a

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.

escape freedom philosophy flee fleeing german-idealism

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

6a905c4

For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.

solitude loneliness escape spirit fear hope london soul

Elizabeth von Arnim

798e95d

Deception' is the word I most associate with anorexia and the treachery which comes from falsehood. The illness appears inviting. It would seem to offer something to those unwary or unlucky enough to suffer from it - friendship, a get-out, or a haven - when, in fact, it is a trap.

illness escape false-friend haveb anorexia-nervosa falsehood treachery deception trap self-deception anorexia eating-disorder mental-illness

Carol Lee

2d019ed

Bosch had never liked Las Vegas, though he came often on cases. It shared a kinship with Los Angeles; both were places desperate people ran to. Often, when they ran from Los Angeles, they came here. It was the only place left.

escape las-vegas nevada los-angeles desperation

Michael Connelly

41ec6b0

Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have been wrong, but I was right.' If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it. I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become. She says suddenly, 'I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.' She holds out her hands. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scares, each about a centimeter long. The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top.

escape courage freedom captive escape-attempt fence gdr berlin-wall self-belief belief teenager wall scars dark-humor

Anna Funder

3c7370d

I came to this city to escape.

escape

Jeanette Winterson

1a8af3c

Despues de exigir mi marcha, ya no posees jurisdiccion en lo concerniente a mi salud.

escape alejamiento huida salud desamor

Salman Rushdie

b124c01

I thought of all the summer evenings I'd spent sitting in the chairs under the trees beside the trailer, reading books that helped me escape Creek View, at least for a little while. Magical kingdoms, Russian love triangles, and the March sisters couldn't have been further away from the trailer park.

escape reading books trailer trailer-park louisa-may-alcott little-women reading-quotes escape-from-reality love-of-reading books-reading love-of-books read

Heather Demetrios

374a2b7

Let me sleep at last. I've had misery enough in my life. You said there was nowhere to go to. There is death to go to. I've had misery enough in my life.

sleep escape desperate the-black-prince iris-murdoch suicidal misery

Iris Murdoch

28ddc31

Woe be to the wug who forgets that destroying one part of a thing does not equal victory

escape mystery-suspense

David Baldacci

46c3414

Running away from uncertainty and confusion but most of all running away from myself. I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.

escape life fleeing running

Jeanette Winterson