Quotes About Escape

The Thirty-nine Steps.

A good story makes a journey go by more quickly. A really good story makes you forget you are even on a journey.

Jesus knew what being rejected felt like. Jesus knew. He knew the feelings. He knew the struggles. And in an earth-shattering moment, Jesus exposed the way of escape for us. He matched every feeling—the emptiness, the deprivation, and the rejection—with truths straight from God's Word. Lies flee in the presence of truth.

An interesting fact about the Garden of Gethsemane is that it sits at the base of a known escape route from the city over the Mount of Olives toward the Judean desert. This is the route David took when running from his son Absalom. Jesus would have known this. But instead of running, He turned to His Father and said nine hell-shattering, demon-shaking, Devil-killing words: "Yet not what I will, but what you will" (Mark 14:36).

we are to escape the natural bitterness of the human heart, we have to go through a long process as well . . . the process of being cured.

I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape…. If you read for escape you will never try to change your life, or anyone else's. It's a politically barren act, if nothing else. The overuse of imaginative fiction enables people to avoid the knowledge that they are actually alive.

There was, for many of us, a great escape in reading about the fantastic and supernatural during wartime. Terrors more terrible than those we were living through gave us an outlet for our anxiety.

Books have a world all their own

I fled so she would not see my tears and wear them as another of her trophies.

My chest trilled with something I could not quite name. Escape, and danger, and hope all at once.

Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing. And so very bad at getting away.

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious.

No one knows how many Russians in all fled the homeland. Perhaps one million, perhaps many more. We are interested here in seventeen, the senior Romanovs, the grand dukes and grand duchesses who escaped the revolution.

I don't like it anymore around here, Meyer. I want to go home. Every time I get blown up by a bomb I get that same feeling. I want to go home.

And to 'scape stormy days, I choose an everlasting night.

There is a wonderful metaphor of the unconscious in Peter Gay's excellent biography of Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 128: "Rather, the unconscious proper resembles a maximum-security prison holding anti-social inmates languishing for years or recently arrived, inmates harshly treated and heavily guarded, but barely kept under control and forever attempting to escape" (italics added).

Reading for pleasure

carefree time on lonesome roads

He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.

We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.

There are many reasons why novelists write but they all have one thing in common a need to create an alternative world.

I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love.

Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he's in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.