“The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it or to escape what is bad in it but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.”

“We never escape our past. It is mirrored in our present. It repeats itself in our future.”

“This negation of our existence, and the omitting of our stories and histories, is one of the reasons I write — I write to exist. We cannot escape our past; our past determines what choices we make for the future. It determines how we act, how we see ourselves…”

“Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities for escape, again, are as many as hiding places. There is a goal, but no way; what we call a way is hesitation.”

“Sometimes it seems Christians confuse their human nature with their sinful nature. The former we were created with, the latter we chose. It does us no good to try and escape our humanness and in so doing think we are escaping our sin. -Fingerprint.”

“There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.”

“I have just discovered something I have always known: we can no more escape from one another than we can escape from God.”

“For intelligent people, action often means escape from thought, but it is a reasonable and a wise escape.”

“We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.”

“But we can't escape into the future like we can escape into the past. So those of us who are not certain of things, and there are an awful lot of us, often rush back to the past. And each one has a particular past he prefers to the present. Sometimes I feel that any past is preferable to the present.”