67 Quotes About Escapism

Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home. J. Maarten Troost

Comfort and security are all well and good, but not at the cost of liberty, love and lustiness. The Bohemian knows that money, property and status have little to do with the content of one’s character, and that professional success and widespread celebration have little to do with talent. Of value to the Bohemian is spiritual integrity and creative freedom. The Bohemian would sooner live in poverty than submit to an undesirable job. . Robert Wringham

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different. And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it's a bad thing. As if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in. If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real. As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers. . Neil Gaiman

I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I’d include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you’ve escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in. So no, they’re not escapist. They’re escape. . Neil Gaiman

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. Rabih Alameddine

Dr. Manning said he'd thought at first it might be sleeping sickness, or even narcolepsy, whatever that was, but - no, Pete was healthy enough physically. Manoel growled that the boy was bone-lazy, spending his time fishing and reading. Reading! No good could come of such things.' In a way you're right, Manoel, ' Dr. Manning said hesitantly. 'It's natural for a boy to day-dream now and then, but I think Pedro does it too much. I've let him use my library whenever he wanted, but it seems.. h'm.. it seems he reads the wrong things. Fairy tales are very charming, but they don't help a boy to cope with real life.'' Com certeza, ' Manoel agreed. 'You mean he has crazy ideas in the head.'' Oh, they're rather nice ideas, ' Dr. Manning said. 'But they're only fairy tales, and they're beginning to seem true to Pete. You see, Manoel, there are really two worlds, the real one, and the one you make up inside your mind. Sometimes a boy - or even a man - gets to like his dream world so much he just forgets about the real one and lives in the one he's made up.'' I know, ' Manoel said. 'I have seen some who do that. It is a bad thing.'' It would be bad for Pete. He's a very sensitive boy. If you live too much in dreams, you can't face real life squarely.'(" Before I Wake.."). Henry Kuttner

For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table. C.s. Lewis

Existential anguish derives from the human freedom to think and act, experience love for life, and fear death. We must decide whether we wish to embrace all experience and encounters in life or seek escape from various aspect of human nature. How we resolve to address existential anguish becomes a large part of our personal story. Kilroy J. Oldster

Every unpleasant worldly experience in life exposes our sensitive nervous systems to painful phenomena. Despite all the beer commercial advertisement slogans urging us to live with gusto, life is unavoidably painful. Life is a battering ram that inflicts trauma upon human beings. People blunt the traumatic force of enduring a lifetime of pain, fearfulness, and unremitted anguish and boredom with religion, sex, booze, drugs, fantasy, and other indulgent acts and forms acts of escapism. . Kilroy J. Oldster

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. . Michael Connelly

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 y Terry Pratchett

His eyeless skull took in the line of costumes, the waxy debris of the makeup table. His empty nostrils snuffed up the mixed smells of mothballs, grease, and sweat. There was something here, he thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects 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 in. Terry Pratchett

Art helps you connect to the world, not escape from it. That is the difference between art and entertainment. James Rozoff

We view art in order to escape our own skins, to get outside of the commotion inside our skulls. Kilroy J. Oldster

Our ability to detect and measure the passage of time is burdensome. The conception and sensation of time bears down upon all of us. It weighs us down; it compresses our souls. There is a variety of ways to escape the dull passage of time or the fearfulness of our accelerating march towards death. We must choose our mechanisms for dealing with the inexorability of time and our finiteness. We can fill our void with work or pleasure, laughter or pain, and fretfulness or courage. We can seek a sense of purposefulness or acknowledge the meaninglessness of life. We can seek to escape the drudgery and pain of life through alcohol, drugs, or pleasure seeking, or by working to support our families and create artistic testaments to our worldly existence. Kilroy J. Oldster

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. Umberto Eco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter. Rollo May

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

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

Boredom and ineffective attempts to escape tedium are the perpetual lot of humankind. Kilroy J. Oldster

Sniffing glue is a homeless nonbeliever's prayer. Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on! Tennessee Williams

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

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 LAmour

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

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

I have spent so many nights out under the stars Euphoria running through my veins and alcohol coursing through my blood My mind would race along with my heart My vision drawn to the stars and all the possibilities of what is out there Suddenly the world and all its problems seems so infinitesimal My mind leaves this plane And a smile is drawn across my face I know this isn’t reality, but I absorb it with all my being I find it better to be lost out here then found in my real life Amongst the stars now I can live And it’s beautiful For the moments it lasts, it’s beautiful Its heaven on earth . Morris R. Gates

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

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

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

This, it would turn out, is the main thing we had in common: a susceptibility to the brassy escapism of myth. Steve Almond

We were miles away from our real lives. Maggie Stiefvater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. Unknown