Best 131 quotes in «escapism quotes» category

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moreover, people have become accustomed to reading to escape as opposed to reading to think.

Most nights she went with the moon, and when it was round she stayed in my biggest bedroom and wouldn’t answer the thing that asked her to let it out (let you out from where? let me out from the small, the hot, the take me out of the fire i am ready i am hard like the stones you ate, bitter like those husks) the moonlight striped her, marked out places where the whispering thing would slip through and she would unfold.

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

Rural and traditional escapism. That’s my angle. Places and events where we are free to relax and be ourselves, where nobody tells us to hurry along or conform or grow up. Somewhere we can properly live.

She was the kind of star who sold happy dreams. She didn't want to sell darkness. Pain was best left in the real world where it belonged, where it burrowed so deep you needed a multimillion-dollar industry to escape from it.

Should consumerism be the last thing we accomplish as a species, after all this evolution and the miraculous series of accidents that granted our sentience? Would that not be an utterly dull and inane end to our history?

Some of our endeavours to eliminate or forget our problems invite more problems.

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.

I fantasize about making reality better.

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

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

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 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.

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.

Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents, cousins, bothers, or uncles, and only leave the house to go to the movies or to the nearest bar. "How're you making it?" on may ask, running into them along the block, or in the bar. "Oh, I'm TV-ing it"; with the saddest, sweetest, most shamefaced of smiles, and from a great distance. This distance one is compelled to respect; anyone who has traveled so far will not easily be dragged again into the world. There are further retreats, of course, than the TV screen or the bar. There are those who are simply sitting on their stoops, "stoned," animated for a moment only, and hideously, by the approach of someone who may lend them the money for a "fix." Or by the approach of someone from whom they can purchase it, one of the shrewd ones, on the way to prison or just coming out.

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

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.

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

One of the most boring things about being in a relationship is that your partner usually makes their boredom your problem.

- Quando sarai stanco di star lì cambierai idea! - gli gridò. - Non cambierò mai idea, - fece mio fratello, dal ramo. - Ti farò vedere io, appena scendi! - - E io non scenderò più! - E mantenne la parola.