Best 131 quotes in «escapism quotes» category

Tant que mes jambes me permettent de fuir, tant que mes bras me permettent de combattre, tant que l'expérience que j'ai du monde me permet de savoir ce que je peux craindre ou désirer, nulle crainte : je puis agir. Mais lorsque le monde des hommes me contraint à observer ses lois, lorsque mon désir brise son front contre le monde des interdits, lorsque mes mains et mes jambes se trouvent emprisonnées dans les fers implacables des préjugés et des cultures, alors je frissonne, je gémis et je pleure. Espace, je t'ai perdu et je rentre en moi-même. Je m'enferme au faite de mon clocher où, la tête dans les nuages, je fabrique l'art, la science et la folie.

The beam of light flashed across her own face and she thought, Yes, me, Khady Demba, still happy to utter her name silently and to sense its apt harmony with the precise, satisfying image she had of her own features and of the Khady heart that dwelled within her to which no one but she had access.

The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?

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.

The latent conflict between the intellectual and the economic upper class is nowhere openly engaged as yet, least of all by the artists, who, with their less developed social consciousness, react more slowly than their humanistic masters. But the problem, even if it is un-admitted and unexpressed is present all the time and in all places, and the whole intelligenstsia, both literary and artistic, is threatened by the danger of developing either into an uprooted, "unbourgeois", and envious class of bohemians or into a conservative, passive cringing class of academics. The humanists escape from from this alternative into their ivory tower, and finally succumb to both the dangers which they had intended to avoid.

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

The only way to truly help most drug addicts and most alcoholics is to—instead of them—change reality.

Then she spent her evenings curled up in her small boardinghouse room, poring over the pages. It was her only escape to a bigger, more interesting world. There are no prison walls if one has books, she had read someplace. But even so, her days and nights often were lonely.

...there was one thing she would think about when she was high, one thing she would feel: that she was transparent, not invisible, but transparent. But this was the thing: she wasn’t see- through, she wasn’t transparent to light like glass or air, she was transparent to the dark. She said that’s what heroin did, it brought her down to the seafloor, the floor of an ocean trench. Relieved of the need to see, relieved of the need to breathe, she belonged to the darkness completely. It possessed her, moved through her unresisted, as though she herself were made of nothing more than water and darkness, as though she herself were nothing more than a place, a place where the current turned on itself a little and moved on...I said that was it, the big question she carried around in her, the question whether despair was the only way out, whether the only thing she could really make was her escape. That makes sense, she said, just as she said whenever she didn’t agree with my interpretation. But . . . there’s a frustration . . . I want to be clear, perfectly clear. You want to be free to stop hiding things. God, if that’s true, she said with sudden coldness, then all of this is just a load of shit. I knew then that I had overstepped and had ruined something, that I had spooked her and she would make her escape into an anodyne or trivial association. To my surprise, however, she countered and pushed ahead. You are wrong. It’s not that I want to stop hiding. It’s not that I want to come out and say the thing I have to say. Don’t you see? I want there to be nothing. Nothing to hide, and no place to put it. No things, no places. Do you see what I am saying? Can you understand that? Jesus, how could you?

There is no time to escape reality.

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

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.

They make one journey after another and change spectacle for spectacle. As Lucretius says, 'Thus each man ever flees himself.' But to what end, if he does not escape himself? He pursues and dogs himself as his own most tedious companion. And so we must realize that our difficulty is not the fault of the places but of ourselves. We are weak in enduring anything, and cannot put up with toil or pleasure or ourselves or anything for long. This weakness has driven some men to their deaths; because by frequently changing their aims they kept falling back on the same things and had left themselves no room for novelty. They began to be sick of life and the world itself, and out of their enervating self-indulgence arose the feeling 'How long must I face the same things?

This particular book felt familiar, like an old friend. The characters drew me into their world, and I blocked out mine for the rest of the afternoon.

Those who avoid reality mustn't dare counsel others on what reality is nor how it shall be dealt with.

Those who constantly seek escapism from reality are in danger of building a reality that's impossible to escape from

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

Time spent doing whatever it is you do to escape your daily life would be better spent acquiring a life that needs no escape.

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

We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.

We left behind the other kids; their path-working, drinking, and being grown up- and rejected all that made them grumpy, uncreative and lifeless. We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place when we decided our lives were meant to be lived. Life serves the risk taker...

We were miles away from our real lives.

...When people lose their way and lack a real purpose for living they often fall back on certain forms of escapism as a form of self-soothing...

Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very young age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. (...) But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinently shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child who was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her.

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.

We both knew no bounds to our escapism.

What his time spent with women offered was the opportunity 2 be embraced by reality on the one hand, while negating it entirely on the other

[When under stress I thought of] the books I had read [and applied] them to myself. I [imagined I was] one of the characters [and soon found myself] in made-up circumstances which were most agreeable to my inclinations.

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.

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.

You break through the veil whenever you strap on a sword or chant the ancient verses. You escape when you write a poem or a tale that brings beauty into the world. You are set free whenever you love—even those who believe you’re crazy.

An avowal of poverty is no disgrace to any man; to make no effort to escape it is indeed disgraceful.

You were trying to find a way to get rid of yourself, but you were still left with your mouth.

Bond was escapism, but not meant to be imitated in real life.

It's all about escapism. That's essentially what all movies are about. It's a vicarious thrill.

escapism isn't good or bad in itself. what is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to.

For me books have always been an incredibly solid part of my life, both as escapism and simply as resource.

Even though music is something I travel around doing, it is also a very private thing. A sort of escapism.

I've loved the escapism of being another person, slipping into another character for a little while

All those other lives. You never did get to lead them.

That is what art is at the end of the day: It's an escapism that we all crave.

All of a sudden his books, which had hitherto been merely a fond decoration and a means of letting his mind free itself from the grim routines of Broadmoor life, had become his most precious possession. For the time being at least he could set aside his imaginings about the harm that people were trying to inflict on him and his person: It was instead his hundreds of books that now needed to be kept safe, and away from the predators with whom he believed the asylum to be infested. His books, and his work on the words he found in them, were about to become the defining feature of his newly chosen life.

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.

Jimi Hendrix's music was escapism.

Would we be so enamored with dystopian fiction if we lived in a culture where violent death was a major concern? It wouldn't be escapism.

Again and again we try to escape ourselves, but we fail in our efforts, constantly run our heads into the wall because we don't want to recognize that we can't escape ourselves, except in death.

An escape can become escapism before we even know it. Books are wonderful things, but you can't live in someone else's story. You have to live your own story.

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

A wave of saudade swept over me as I realized home never existed at all. The concept of home felt far from my reach, and I felt sick with longing.

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...