Escapism Quotes

I instantly dragged my fingers across a shelf of book spines, in love with each one already. Books were a safe place, a world apart from my own. No matter what had happened that day, that year, there was always a story in which someone overcame their darkest hour. I wasn't alone.

Kiera Cass

But I reckon that this realm of higher needs, of something more than just forgetting about everyday life, of mere recreation, this realm of needs has been clearly neglected by us.

Krzysztof Kieślowski

Leaving the rat race is easy. All you have to do is quit your job, sell your house, and go and live in a tent in the middle of nowhere. It’s staying out of the rat race that’s tricky.

Fennel Hudson

Don’t judge me for escaping the stresses and cruelty of the world differently than you do.

Dan Pearce

Isolation serves as the ideal antidote to the bone-aching stresses of work.

Fennel Hudson

Bonnie saw ropes hanging loose, poles falling away, tree-tops sinking beneath her. As they rose, the sun rose with them. Its warmth turned the dark skin of the fiery balloon midnight blue. They flew straight up. Above them, the sweet, clear music of the lonely pipe called to them. Then the smooth sky puckered into cloth-of-blue and drew aside. They passed straight through...

Pauline Fisk

Sometimes Geraldine feels like she can drive forever. Maybe that’s partially why she took a job at Milo General Motors. Driving is the best means of escape that the human race has, at least, that’s her opinion. She’s never had the guts to try drugs before, both because her sister was a junkie in the last few months she knew her, and because she’s heard the overdose horror stories, seen 'Requiem for a Dream', smelled the vapours of a meth lab that Julia’s boyfriend built, heard the crunching glass of crack vials and heroine needles when they happen to break. Even this alone is too surreal, not to mention that if she were high or tripping on acid or whatever the drug of choice may be, this would give the ghosts more power to morph into something even more nightmarish than they already are.

Rebecca McNutt

Now the city is at its loveliest. The crowds of summer and autumn have gone, the air has a new freshness, the light has that pale-gold quality unique to this time of year. There have been several weeks of this weather now, without a drop of rain.

Lucy Foley

I had drunk myself to oblivion,Stepped from the room into a dreamless slumber,My consciousness had parted ways,Taking a well-earned vacation.

Morris R. Gates

I want to glide in a world of beauty,’ I said. ‘To be carried away into a world of luxurious things.

James Lusarde

The doorbell rings and I sink into a heap on the carpet. With any luck, whoever is down there will just go away. But I’m just starting to think nothing goes away, no matter how deep you try to bury it.

Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

Once I learned, I went online and ordered every romance novel I could find. They're fairy tales for grown-ups.

Gena Showalter

Sleeping is the most common attempt to temporarily escape reality.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Understand, it’s never been easy to live, when we’re trying to escape ourselves.

Kelli Russell Agodon

My attraction to drugs is based on an immense desire to annihilate awareness.

Anaïs Nin

Yes, life is hard,” whispers Erika, “but knowing about other people, other civilisations, other ways of living, other places – that’s your escape route, a magical journey. Once you know about these things, no matter what happens, your mind can create stories to take you anywhere you want to go.

Eliza Granville

I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there.

Sara Sheridan

Judging others is too often escapism dressed in the garb of righteous indignation, whereby I dutifully point out in others that which I probably should be pointing out in myself.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Religion is a non-alcoholic man's alcohol. Alcohol is a non-religious man's religion.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely to fall in love.

Elizabeth Gilbert

To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children's characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite 'universes' presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.

Alan Moore

We were miles away from our real lives.

Maggie Stiefvater

Often the most tricky questions are the ones we secretly know the answers of.What are you running from?What are you waiting for?

Sanhita Baruah

The inartistic methods that we use to blunt anxiety and unartful expedients that we resort to in order to escape pain and numb banality reveals what we dread most, the act of suffering from a mortal loss or the debasement that we earn by wallowing in our decadent acts of escapism.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now. For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time.Well, I have lived most of my life; I can be robbed of only a few more years. But it seems too bad - this universal craving to escape what could be a rich, productive, happy world. We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask. Why in the world can't we have it? ("I'm Scared")

Jack Finney

I have spent so many nights out under the starsEuphoria running through my veins and alcohol coursing through my bloodMy mind would race along with my heartMy vision drawn to the stars and all the possibilities of what is out thereSuddenly the world and all its problems seems so infinitesimal My mind leaves this plane And a smile is drawn across my faceI know this isn’t reality, but I absorb it with all my beingI find it better to be lost out here then found in my real lifeAmongst the stars now I can live And it’s beautiful For the moments it lasts, it’s beautifulIts heaven on earth

Morris R. Gates

Everyone needs to escape sometimes, and retreating into somebody else's fantasy isn't nearly as satisfying as slipping into your own.

Nenia Campbell

Let those who smile at me, ask themselves whether they have been indebted most to imagination or reality for all they have enjoyed in life, if indeed they have ever enjoyed any thing.

Charles Robert Maturin

I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.I’m free, and against organized, clothed society.I’m naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.

Fernando Pessoa

To hide away from the world whose loveless heart has gone astrayand its inhabitants what could be a safer place than my imagination?

Anna Jae

We both knew no bounds to our escapism.

Hannah Lillith Assadi

I'm sorry! I really am! I wanted to get out of this place! I want to live! I want to get away from here and never see it again! I hate everything about it!""You will hate the next place, too," I said. "What you are you will carry with you.

Louis L'Amour

i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

Khaled Hosseini

With even the slightest upset, detachment soon followed. I didn’t lose sleep over men, and I was too restless to be tied down. The grass didn’t even have time to grow around my feet before I was planning my next escape – whether it was to another state or out of someone’s life.

M.B. Dallocchio

In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as “escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even have the disastrous effect on the reader of taking him happily for a few hours out of his own real life in N.W.8. Why this should be a matter for regret I do not know; nor why realism in a novel is so much admired when realism in a picture is condemned as mere photography; nor, I might add, why drink and fornication should seem to bring the realist closer to real life than, say, golf and gardening.

A.A. Milne

People talk-- they sneer at escapism. Well, there are those of us who need it.

Piers Anthony

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as do the ordinary people, but to fulfill it in its true potential - the imagination.

Lawrence Durrell

Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.

Rollo May

Fiction is just that–fiction. Yes, it is serious business, but it should also be taken for face value. It’s entertainment. It’s escapism. It’s 365 pages of relaxation.

Rachael Wade

While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest.

H.P. Lovecraft

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.

Orson Scott Card

I talk too much, but there's a lot unsaid. I've slept in a lot of beds.

Kris Kidd

The supposed reality of misfiring synapses, chemical imbalances, frontal lobe anomalies and the like - did not sway her desire for escape into an alternate universe - where she could discover fascinating things about her inner world - or where she could hide from the real world.

Kelly Proudfoot

There is no time to escape reality.

Lange Weile

Reality worked its way into my dreams where it wasn’t welcome.

Emilyann Girdner

There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.

Arthur C. Clarke

People talk about escapism as if it's a bad thing... Once you've escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.

Neil Gaiman

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

Shirley Jackson

Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of "escape." I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers.

C.S. Lewis

There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.

Arthur Conan Doyle

A person must face the root cause of their relentless personal pain. Irrespective of whatever bricks buttress our youthful personal philosophy, pain avoidance, and pain therapy are likely two of its foundation stones.

Kilroy J. Oldster

All the time, I looked out our lattice window. I watched the birds fly by. I followed the clouds on their travels. I studied the moon as it grew larger, then shrank. So much happened outside my window that I almost forgot what was happening inside that room.

Lisa See

All we do is work to maximise our consumption privileges and to be able to tell people at parties that we’re a lawyer, an artist or a police officer.

Robert Wringham

We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.(pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America")

Wendell Berry

[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.(pg. 44, "The Unsettling of America")

Wendell Berry

Whenever I come across someone speaking negatively about escapism or looking down on those who seek a temporary escape from this world, I can't help but look at them as absolute fools. To deny someone the right to find temporary peace in escapism is to deny human nature itself as well as all the benefits of such a beautiful concept. Often times, these instances show them saying that "it'll only make things worse" or "it's not gonna change anything", except, a lot of times, that's not the case at all. How many times has someone shut themselves away from the world by listening to a song they hold dear only to return more ready to face the world than before, how many times has someone learned something about themselves through the fictional events of a novel that they wouldn't have other wise, how many times has society experienced great change through people who dreamed of making the world a better place, only to eventually make those dreams into a reality.

Justin Allen

I loved books, even as I loved the similar way opium had of transporting a mind elsewhere

Karina Cooper

Relatable escapism can only be achieved using facets of the real world.

Kevin Focke

Reading is important. It’s not primarily escapism (though it can be, and there’s nothing wrong with some of that in good measure) and it’s not primarily a way of passing the time. Reading is important to the good life because it stokes the furnaces of our intellect, allows us to expand our understanding of the universe, both inner and outer, for practical gain and simple pleasure. It can induce awe, inspire respect, excite, piss off, and intrigue. These are things that make life worth living.

Robert Wringham

How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time...

Neil Gaiman

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Escapism Quotes

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