Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
Context: The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
“Faith — what is this emotion but a desperate attempt to escape from mind-burning fear?”
Source: The Broken God (1992), p. 424
Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Happiness
“He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There'd been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from?”
Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 1
Context: There'd been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: and what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited upon her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?
Women Saints of East and West
