Smashing Pumpkins (1996)
“the only escape from the miseries of life are music and cats…”
“I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape.”
Asked how dancing & music complement each other
Attributed
Source: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857), Ch. 45
Context: I cannot tell you how thankful I am for your reminding me about the apocrypha here. For the moment, its being such escaped me. Fact is, when all is bound up together, it's sometimes confusing. The uncanonical part should be bound distinct. And, now that I think of it, how well did those learned doctors who rejected for us this whole book of Sirach. I never read anything so calculated to destroy man's confidence in man. This son of Sirach even says — I saw it but just now: 'Take heed of thy friends'; not, observe, thy seeming friends, thy hypocritical friends, thy false friends, but thy friends, thy real friends — that is to say, not the truest friend in the world is to be implicitly trusted. Can Rochefoucault equal that? I should not wonder if his view of human nature, like Machiavelli's, was taken from this Son of Sirach. And to call it wisdom — the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach! Wisdom, indeed! What an ugly thing wisdom must be! Give me the folly that dimples the cheek, say I, rather than the wisdom that curdles the blood. But no, no; it ain't wisdom; it's apocrypha, as you say, sir. For how can that be trustworthy that teaches distrust?
“While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.”
Source: The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus
Life in the Industry: A Musician's Diary
“Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.”
Part I, ch. 2
Variant: "Forget about what you are escaping from," he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum's. "Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to."
Source: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
"Recipe to prevent the cold of January from utterly destroying life" (30 January 1841), quoted in Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1898) by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, p. 97.
