Quotes About Escape

In truth, difficult as it was, pulling up stakes was in many ways easier than staying. It gave me an excellent excuse to postpone mundane but frightening decisions about where and how to live. I would disappear from the overdetermined, underwhelming world of disco-dulled, energy crisis America. I might even become another person- someone more to my liking- in the antipodes.

Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.

He robbed a bank in Wichita.

If this were my country, Odile said, wrinkling her nose, I would not be angry. No? Hollis asked. I would drink all the time. Take pill. Anything.

subgenres are products of the writers' urgent necessity to avoid tangling with a realistic

And what have I done? What? WHAT?...You've stolen them. With that, Cornelia fled, but Buttercup understood; she knew who them was. The boys. The beef-witted featherbrained rattledskulled clodpated dim-domed noodle-noggined sapheaded lunk-knobbed BOYS.

With any luck at all," he said, "we should soon be safely in the Fire Swamp.

Butch: Now after we.... wait a minute... Sundance: What? Butch: You didn't see Lefors out there? Sundance: Lefors ? No. Butch: Good. For a minute there I thought we were in trouble.

He had felt no pain, not once, none. He had closed his eyes and taken his brain away. That was the secret. If you could take your brain away from the present and sent it to where it could contemplate skin like wintry cream; well, let them enjoy themselves.

Kid -- the next time I say, 'Let's go someplace like Bolivia,' let's go someplace like Bolivia.

Man flieht nicht, weil man Angst hat, sondern man hat Angst, weil man flieht.

For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no escape. What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth. Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true might at this rate be treated as godlike, and a man's religion might thus be identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, toward what he felt to be the primal truth.

Often we have tried to segregate ourselves from it all. We have found three refuges: ourselves, our books . . . our friends . . . the lakes and woods around Berlin.

As an escape, I suppose, I read some Goethe letters this afternoon. It was reassuring to be reminded of the devastation of Germany that Napoleon wrought. Apparently Jena, near Goethe's Weimar, was pretty roughly handled by the French troops. But through it all the great poet never loses hope. He keeps saying that the Human Spirit will triumph, the European spirit. But today, where is the European spirit in Germany? Dead.… Dead…

A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don't look back, don't be each other's anchors, no nostalgia.

classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don't look back, don't be each other's anchors, no nostalgia.

I wish that there was nothing to hold me here, that gravity was a suggestion I could ignore.

Fainting with heat, he suddenly found himself in the cold, cold river. He had turned into a fish. Tail, body, fins - everything was fishlike, except the head, which was his own and still ached. He swam through the muted, cool, underwater darkness and thought that now he would remain a fish forever and never go back to the moutains. "I won't return," he said to himself. "It's better to be a fish, it's better to be a fish...

But I was like a bird caught in a snare. Only, the wires of this snare were made of curiosity and a disobedient heart.

I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so swift and bright that no man could snare them.

Whether we eat, sleep, work, play, whatever we do life contains dissatisfaction, pain. If we enjoy pleasure, we are afraid to lose it; we strive for more and more pleasure or try to contain it. If we suffer pain we want to escape it. We experience dissatisfaction all the time. All activities contain dissatisfaction or pain, continuously.

He too, it seemed, had come to believe that he could somehow escape history. That it was possible, and even desirable, to live in a perpetual present.

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

But the film in your memory, you cannot walk out of it so easily. Wherever you go it is always playing. So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.