Best 131 quotes in «escapism quotes» category

Escapism preserves our sanity when the ever-increasing complexity and pace of modern life becomes too much.

Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.

Escapism isn't good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to. I write from experience, since in my case I escaped to the idea that books could be really enjoyable, an aspect of reading that teachers had not hitherto suggested.

Every book was a door; every page a new place to hide.

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

Evet Wilhelm, bazen bir an için kalkıp gitme, bağları koparma cesareti buluyorum kendimde, keşke nereye gideceğimi bilsem! heralde giderdim.

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.

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.

Fishing encourages escapism.

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")

Forgive us our fantasies. It’s all we have.

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.

He turns toward the voice. It is as though the darkness itself has spoken. But when he looks closer he can make her out - the very pale blonde hair first, gleaming in what little light there is, then the shimmering stuff of her dress.

He's an escapist. He wants to cultivate his interior garden.

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.

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...

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.

I fantasize about making reality better.

If fiction and fantasy books are escapism, then let an author write them so as to better equip the reader to face reality by the end.

If we were all minimalists instead of conspicuous consumers, there would be less demand on the world’s resources and we’d have a smaller, less berserk economy. We’d be less likely to harm the only planet we’ll ever have, and the super-rich would have fewer ways to exploit us.

If you have burning desire to be free (as I have) you must first find this freedom within you. And to be free in this manner, you have to be comfortable with who and what you are.

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

I had always thought it was her way of blinding herself to the messiness of the way we lived. Now I realised it was easier for her mind to go out through the air far above the clouds then to acknowledge the ugliness right before her eyes.

I had always thought it was her way of blinding herself to the messiness of the way we lived. Now I realised it was easier for her mind to go out through the air far above the clouds than to acknowledge the ugliness right before her eyes.

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!

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

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.

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.

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

I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger.

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

I mentioned early in this book the kind of rereading distinctive of a fan--the Tolkien addict, say, or the devotee of Jane Austen or Trollope or the Harry Potter books. The return to such books is often motivated by a desire to dwell for a time in a self-contained fictional universe, with its own boundaries and its own rules. (It is a moot question whether Austen and Trollope's first readers were drawn to their novels for these reasons, but their readers today often are.) Such rereading is not purely a matter of escapism, even though that is one reason for its attraction: we should note that it's not what readers are escaping from but that they are escaping into that counts most. Most of us do not find fictional worlds appealing because we find our own lives despicable, though censorious people often make that assumption. Auden once wrote that "there must always be ... escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep." The sleeper does not disdain consciousness.

I passed people shopping or walking their dogs, and young people, university students maybe, busy about their lives, so that the streets I walked seemed vibrant to me, more vibrant than my own. But then almost everywhere I went I imagined a place more accommodating of the life I wanted, as if happiness were a matter of streets or parks, as maybe to a point it is; and with R. away for so long I was accustomed to thinking of my real life existing in some distant place or future time, projecting forward in a way that I was afraid might keep me from living fully where I was.

I passed people shopping or walking their dogs, and young people, university students maybe, busy about their lives, so that the streets I walked seems vibrant to me, more vibrant than my own. But then almost everywhere I went I imagined a place more accommodating of the life I wanted, as if happiness were a matter of streets or parks, as maybe to a point it is; and with R. away for so long I was accustomed to thinking of my real life existing in some distant place or future time, projecting forward in a way that I was afraid might keep me from living fully where I was.

I steel myself to ignore his taunts and his coarse language. I no longer care what he says or does. It doesn't matter anymore. I am detached, contained in my own private world where he cannot reach me. It is my last refuge.

I started running to escape the memories that drinking couldn't cover up

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

It's fogging a little, but I won't slip off and hide in it. No...never again...

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

I think part of the reason escapism is a predominate aspect of American arts—especially cinema—is because that’s what’s in our DNA. Our ancestors came here to avoid whatever was happening where they were originally from. Escapism is literally in our genes.

It may be escapist, but if I have a choice between watching the news or reading a book which gets me to see the world through different eyes, I will always choose the latter!

I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

It's more like... It keeps the world out so I can be in my own thoughts.

It almost never takes a pleasant state of mind to desire to be high or drunk.

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.

I tried to picture a future reader for my output so as to take my cues from him. My themes were utterly foreign to him, indeed the whole environment I conjured up before his eyes could only seem abstruse and outlandish, as though I sought to transport him to a world that, though familiar to him from earlier times, now seemed thrust to the margins, so that no previously valid form of description could be used for it ... I wrote for an utterly impossible reader, for one reader alone, and that reader was myself.

It’s not possible to run away from yourself. Unless, of course, you’re schizophrenic and can take holidays outside your mind.

I understand why you need to add a release valve and learn how to steer the balloon. But after that - what will you do with a better balloon?' ... A dreamy smile tugged at his lips. 'I'd fly away, of course.

I’ve indulged all my escapist dreams. I’m here, away from everyone, living it up. Being a selfish and antisocial git.

I wanted to just sink into my media downloads for a while and pretend I didn't exist.