Quotes about escape

A collection of quotes on the topic of escape, use, life, doing.

Kurt Cobain quote: “We're so trendy we can't even escape ourselves.”

Suzanne Collins quote: “Once I'm on my feet I realize escape might not be so easy.”

Charles Bukowski quote: “too often, the only escape is sleep”

Quotes about escape

“He cannot stop imagining his bloody hands or himself lying mortally at the bottom of that bathtub, which, for now, serves as his refuge, as his escape from the World, from that which is outside, but which, Any day now, I could decide to go in.”

José Baroja book Un hijo de perra y otros cuentos

Imagination, Lying, World

“We're so trendy we can't even escape ourselves.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

“To a surrounded enemy, you must leave a way of escape.”

Sun Tzu (-543–-495 BC) ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher from the Zhou Dynasty

Source: The Art of War, Chapter VII · Military Maneuvers

Way

“Trapped in life, only escape I know is death.”

E.M.S (1995) Nigerian rapper, singer and record producer

"Hidden"

Life, Death

“If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1960s, A Time for Choosing (1964)
Context: If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

Freedom

“I like people to go away from a Queen show feeling fully entertained, having had a good time. I think Queen songs are pure escapism, like going to see a good film - after that, they can go away and say that was great, and go back to their problems. I don't want to change the world with our music. There are no hidden messages in our songs, except for some of Brian's.”

Freddie Mercury (1946–1991) British singer, songwriter and record producer

"The Man Who Would Be Queen" in Melody Maker (2 May 1981).

Time, People, Music, Problem

“Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
but that is out of the question.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Question, Flying

“Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

Dreams, Sleep

“I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.”

Henri Bergson book An Introduction to Metaphysics

An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), translated by T. E. Hulme. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912, p. 44

Change

“And just as he who, with exhausted breath,
having escaped from the sea to shore,
turns to the perilous waters and gazes.”

Dante Alighieri book Inferno

Canto I, lines 22–24 (tr. Mandelbaum).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno

Water, Sea

“And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it,
neither brave man nor coward, I tell you—
it's born with us the day that we are born.”

Homér Iliad

VI. 488–489 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

Fate

“To escape responsibility for violence we imagine it is enough to pledge never to be the first to do violence. But no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.”

René Girard (1923–2015) French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science

Source: The One by Whom Scandal Comes

Imagination, Personality

“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”

Hannah Arendt book The Origins of Totalitarianism

Source: The Origins of Totalitarianism

History, Effort, Time

“The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Misattributed Source: The first citation appears in a translation of Leo Tolstoy's Bethink Yourselves! http://www.nonresistance.org/docs_htm/Tolstoy/~Bethink_Yourselves/BY_chapter08.html by NONRESISTANCE.ORG. The claim made that it is from Marcus Aurelius. Nothing closely resembling it appears in Meditations, nor does it appear in a 1904 translation of Bethink Yourselves http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/bethink-yourselves/8/. The 1904 translation may be abridged, whereas the NONRESISTANCE.ORG translation claims to be unabridged.

Life

“I don't run away from a challenge because I am afraid. Instead, I run towards it because the only way to escape fear is to trample it beneath your foot”

Nadia Comăneci (1961) Romanian gymnast

Fear, Way

“Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“And I prophesy to you who are my murderers, that immediately after my death punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will surely await you. Me you have killed because you wanted to escape the accuser, and not to give an account of your lives. But that will not be as you suppose: far otherwise. For I say that there will be more accusers of you than there are now; accusers whom hitherto I have restrained: and as they are younger they will be more severe with you, and you will be more offended at them. For if you think that by killing men you can avoid the accuser censoring your lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honorable; the easiest and the noblest way is not to be crushing others, but to be improving yourselves.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

39c–d
Plato, Apology

Death, Men, Way, Thinking

“Of escape there are but three methods — two chimerical and a third real. The first two are the dram-shop and the church, debauchery of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution.”

Mikhail Bakunin book God and the State

God and the State (1871; publ. 1882)

“I would rather die having spoken in my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet in law ought any man use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death, if a man is willing to say or do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs deeper than death.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

38e–39a
Plato, Apology

Death, War, Law, Way

“At the dinner table when I was very little, I would hear people bickering – the father saying something, the mother choosing to defend herself. To escape the bickering, I started modelling the soft bread with my fingers. With the dough of the French bread – sometimes it was still warm – I would make little figures. And I would line them up on the table and this was really my first sculpture.”

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) American and French sculptor

Louise Bourgeois: a web of emotions, 2010

People

“I wake up from dreams and go, 'Wow, put this down on paper.' The whole thing is strange. You hear the words, everything is right there in front of your face. And you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry, I just didn't write this. It's there already.' That's why I hate to take credit for the songs I've written. I feel that somewhere, someplace, it's been done and I'm just a courier bringing it into the world. I really believe that. I love what I do. I'm happy at what I do. It's escapism.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

"Michael Jackson - Life in the magical kingdom" - Rolling Stone (February 17, 1983) http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/michael-jackson-life-in-the-magical-kingdom-19830217 "Michael Jackson - Life in the Magical Kingdom" Rolling Stone 1983

Love, Hate, World, Dreams

“Sprinting from one shady patch to another to escape the blistering heat of the sun on my journey to school
Felling the massacre on that fearsome night when most of my family was slaughtered
racing trains for fun
outrunning the police when I was caught stealing in Shahdra
leaving every one behind in my first race as an army jawan so that I could get an extra glass of milk
surging past my competitors in Tokyo when I was declared Asia’s best athlete
Running in Pakistan and being hailed as "The Flying Sikh."”

Milkha Singh (1935) Indian track and field athlete

The Race of My Life: An Autobiography Milkha Singh (2013)

School, Family, Sun, Past

“It is true I wished to escape; and so I wish still; is not this lawful for all prisoners?”

Joan of Arc (1412–1431) French folk heroine and Roman Catholic saint

First public examination (21 February 1431)
Trial records (1431)

Law

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.”

Ransom Riggs book Miss Peregrine's Home of Peculiar Children

Source: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011), Chapter 11, Page 351

Life, Dreams

“You want to have proven to you that the soul is imperishable and immortal, and you think that the philosopher who is confident in death has but a vain and foolish confidence, if he thinks that he will fare better than one who has led another sort of life, in the world below, unless he can prove this; and you say that the strength and divinity of the soul, and of her existence prior to our becoming men, does not necessarily imply her immortality. …For any man, who is not devoid of natural feeling, has reason to fear, if he has no knowledge or proof of the soul's immortality. That is what I suppose you to say, Cebes, which I designedly repeat, in order that nothing may escape us…”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Life, Death, Men, World

“We have no more thought of using our own powers to escape the arm of authorities than had the Apostles of old. No more are we ready to keep silent at man's behest when God commands us to speak. For it is, and must remain, the case that we must obey God rather than man.”

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor

Last sermon before being imprisoned by the Nazi regime of Germany (27 June 1937), as quoted in Religion in the Reich (1939) by Michael Power, p. 142

God

“Art… is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.”

W. Somerset Maugham book Of Human Bondage

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 42

Life, Women, Food, Art

“One would much rather that twenty guilty persons should escape the punishment of death, than that one innocent person should be condemned and suffer capitally.”

John Fortescue (1394–1476) Chief Justice of the King's Bench of England

De laudibus legum Angliae (c. 1470), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Death, Suffering, Personality

“Science is never finished because the human mind only uses a small portion of its capacity, and man's exploration of his world is also limited. If we look at this tree outside whose roots search beneath the pavement for water, or a flower which sends its sweet smell to the pollinating bees, or even our own selves and the inner forces that drive us to act, we can see that we all dance to a mysterious tune, and the piper who plays this melody from an inscrutable distance—whatever name we give him—Creative Force, or God—escapes all book knowledge.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 14

God, Books, World, Search

“Before, he had fought against the money code, and yet he had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself—to sink, as Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being under ground. He liked to think of the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition. It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself forever.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 10

Money, People, World, Failure

“Conan represented the ability to escape briefly from black reality that Howard wished he could emulate.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

About
Context: "Howard takes great care to develop mood and atmosphere in his best stories, and in so doing makes the reader feel the dark, desperate undercurrent of his character's schemes and struggles. It is in this that I feel closest to Howard, and it is something that his conscious imitators have never captured. The disparity of writing styles aside, the mood immediately sets pastiche-Howard apart from the real article. Pseudo-Conan is out having just the best time, 'cause he's the biggest, toughest, mightiest-thewed barbarian on the block, and he's gonna have a swell time of brawling and chopping monsters and rescuing princesses and offing wizards and drinking and brawling and … and... etc... etc.... But in Howard's fiction the underlying black mood of pessimism is always there, and even Conan, who enjoys a binge or a good fight, is not having a good time of it at all. This is particularly true of Solomon Kane and King Kull-driven men whom not even a desperate battle can exorcise their black mood, while Conan at times can find brief surcease in excesses of pleasure or violence. I think Solomon Kane and King Kull were closer to Howard's true mood, while Conan represented the ability to escape briefly from black reality that Howard wished he could emulate. He failed. Of all Howard's characters I most prefer King Kull, and it is Kull who is closest to my own Kane..." ~ Karl Edward Wagner, Midnight Sun, "The Once and Future Kane", 2007, (First published in REH: Lone Star Fictioneer #1, Spring 1975)

Reality

“Above all avoid speaking of persons, either in the way of praise or blame, or comparison. If you can, win over the conversation of your company to what it should be by your own. But if you should find yourself cut off without escape among strangers and aliens, be silent.”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

Golden Sayings of Epictetus
Context: Let silence be your general rule; or say only what is necessary and in few words. We shall, however, when occasion demands, enter into discourse sparingly, avoiding such common topics as gladiators, horse-races, athletes; and the perpetual talk about food and drink. Above all avoid speaking of persons, either in the way of praise or blame, or comparison. If you can, win over the conversation of your company to what it should be by your own. But if you should find yourself cut off without escape among strangers and aliens, be silent. (164).

Way, Personality

“Often and often, a marriage hardly differs from prostitution except by being harder to escape from.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Ch VIII: The World As It Could Be Made, p. 129-130
1910s, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918)
Context: One of the most horrible things about commercialism is the way in which it poisons the relations of men and women. The evils of prostitution are generally recognized, but, great as they are, the effect of economic conditions on marriage seems to me even worse. There is not infrequently, in marriage, a suggestion of purchase, of acquiring a woman on condition of keeping her in a certain standard of material comfort. Often and often, a marriage hardly differs from prostitution except by being harder to escape from. The whole basis of these evils is economic. Economic causes make marriage a matter of bargain and contract, in which affection is quite secondary, and its absence constitutes no recognized reason for liberation. Marriage should be a free, spontaneous meeting of mutual instinct, filled with happiness not unmixed with a feeling akin to awe: it should involve that degree of respect of each for the other that makes even the most trifling interference with liberty an utter impossibility, and a common life enforced by one against the will of the other an unthinkable thing of deep horror.

Marriage

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

He liked to think of the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition. It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself forever.
Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 10

Money, Self-confidence, World

“Celebrate my escape, sold the Glock, bought some weight. Laid back, I got some money to make. Motherfucker!”

The Notorious B.I.G. (1972–1997) American rapper

"Runnin'"
Song lyrics

Money, Making love

“I'd rather ten guilty persons should escape, than one innocent should suffer.”

Julius Caesar (-100–-44 BC) Roman politician and general

Attributed by Edward Seymour in 1696 during the parliamentary proceedings against John Fenwick ( "I am of the same opinion with the Roman, who, in the case of Catiline, declared, he had rather ten guilty persons should escape, than one innocent should suffer" http://books.google.com/books?id=dIM-AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA565), to which Lieutenant General Harry Mordaunt replied "The worthy member who spoke last seems to have forgot, that the Roman who made that declaration was suspected of being a conspirator himself" (Caesar was the only one who spoke in the Senate against executing Catiline's co-conspirators and was indeed suspected by some to be involved in the plot). However, the Caesar's corresponding speech as transmitted by Sallust http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Sallust/Bellum_Catilinae*.html#51 contains no such phrase, even though it appears to be somewhat similar in spirit ("Whatever befalls these prisoners will be well deserved; but you, Fathers of the Senate, are called upon to consider how your action will affect other criminals. All bad precedents have originated in cases which were good; but when the control of the government falls into the hands of men who are incompetent or bad, your new precedent is transferred from those who well deserve and merit such punishment to the undeserving and blameless.") The first person to undoubtedly utter such a dictum was in fact John Fortescue ("It is better to allow twenty criminals to mercifully avoid death than to unjustly condemn one innocent person"). It should also be noted that whether the exchange between Seymour and Mordaunt even happened is itself not clearly established http://books.google.com/books?id=IitDAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA694. Misattributed

Personality, Suffering

“Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born.”

Homér Iliad

Source: The Iliad

Death, Fate

“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Anger

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Quoted in Vernon K. McLellan (2000) Wise Words and Quotes
Misattributed

“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Birthday, Life

“War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

As quoted in This I Believe (1954), by Edward R. Murrow, p. 16
Variant: War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Source: This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of One Hundred Thoughtful Men and Women

Peaceful, War, Peace, Problem

“Oh, escape is easy once you have the right plan.'
'Do we have the right plan?'
'Not yet.'
'Do we have any plan?'
'Not yet.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Death Bringer

“Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

Truth

“In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Books, World, Dreams

“So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Source: The Quiet American

Silence

“those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Hell

“There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

Pain, Reality, Time

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.”

Graham Greene book Ways of Escape

New York Times (January 8, 1981)
Source: Ways of Escape

Fear, Painting, Madness

“Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure: The Basis Of Culture

Way

“Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Reality, Sense

“When everyone drowns and I'm the only one to escape, God is protecting me. When everyone else is saved and I'm the only one to drown, God is protecting me then too.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Last Temptation of Christ

Source: The Last Temptation of Christ

God

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

Frank Herbert book Dune

Source: Dune

“Things every person should have:

•A nemesis.
•An evil twin.
•A secret headquarters.
•An escape hatch.
•A partner in crime.
•A secret identity.”

Wil Wheaton (1972) American actor and writer

Secret, Evil, Personality

“Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don't realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even then any movie.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Children, Passion, Reading

“I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

Music, Thinking, Sense

“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

Bell Hooks book All About Love: New Visions

Source: All About Love: New Visions

Love, Fear, Art, Communication

“Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.”

Michael Crichton book Jurassic Park

Source: Jurassic Park

Life, Way, History

“There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind.”

Douglas Adams book So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Source: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

Heart

“To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

People, Behavior, Intelligence

“No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Loneliness

“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don't need to escape from.”

Seth Godin (1960) American entrepreneur, author and public speaker

Life

“Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1920s, Marriage and Morals (1929)

Love, Women, Men, Affliction

“I am the escaped one,
After I was born
They locked me up inside me
But I left.
My soul seeks me,
Through hills and valley,
I hope my soul
Never finds me.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

Hope, Soul

“He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one's own being.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

“Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

“It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Law, Personality

“the only escape from the miseries of life are music and cats…”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Life, Music, Cats

“To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Life, Suffering

“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.”

T.S. Eliot book Tradition and the Individual Talent

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.

Personality

“There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness;…. and, to know, rather consists in opening out a way where the imprisoned splendor may escape, then in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Truth, Way, Light

“Contrary to what phenomenology—which is always phenomenology of perception—has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.”

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) French philosopher (1930-2004)

“The more you can escape from how horrible things really are, the less it's going to bother you… and then, the worse things get.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

“These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“What will be will be. No one can escape fate's design.”

Christopher Paolini (1983) American author

Fate

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”

Lloyd Alexander (1924–2007) American children's writer

A Visit with Lloyd Alexander https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GilIovrb4uE&feature=youtu.be&t=5m43s (1994)

Way, Understanding, Reality

“A strong pursuit, give no time for the enemy to think, take advantage of victory, uproot him, cut off his escape route.”

Alexander Suvorov (1730–1800) Russian military commander

Quoted in V. Ye. Savkin, "Basic Principles of Operational Art and Tactics," 1972.

Thinking, Strong, Time, Victory

“If ever I do escape, no one shall reproach me with having broken or violated my faith, not having given my word to any one, whosoever it may be.”

Joan of Arc (1412–1431) French folk heroine and Roman Catholic saint

First public examination (21 February 1431) http://www.stjoan-center.com/Trials/sec01.html Trial records (1431)

Faith

“Take care that none of them escapes.”

Charlemagne (748–814) King of the Franks, King of Italy, and Holy Roman Emperor

Quoted in Notker's The Deeds of Charlemagne (translated 2008 by David Ganz). Referring to conspirators against Pope Leo III.

“From literature to ecology, from the escape velocity of galaxies to the greenhouse effect, from garbage disposal methods to traffic jams, everything is discussed in our world. But the democratic system, as if it were a given fact, untouchable by nature until the end of time, we don't discuss that.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Intervention in the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, February of 1992; quoted in Las leyes antidiscriminatorias en el Mercosur: Impactos de la III conferencia mundial contra el racismo, la discriminación racial, la xenofobia y las formas conexas de intolerancia, Durban, 2001: informe sobre el seminario realizado en Montevideo, 29 y 30 de abril de 2002. Published by Organizaciones Mundo Afro, 2002 163 pages.

World, Literature, Nature, Time

“Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes — desertion after desertion.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Night, Dead

“However—the crucial thing is my lack of interest in ordinary life. No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it—and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order… defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law… are concerned. Just why this is so I haven't the slightest idea—it simply is so. I am interested only in broad pageants—historic streams—orders of biological, chemical, physical, and astronomical organisation—and the only conflict which has any deep emotional significance to me is that of the principle of freedom or irregularity or adventurous opportunity against the eternal and maddening rigidity of cosmic law… especially the laws of time…. Hence the type of thing I try to write. Naturally, I am aware that this forms a very limited special field so far as mankind en masse is concerned; but I believe (as pointed out in that Recluse article) that the field is an authentic one despite its subordinate nature. This protest against natural law, and tendency to weave visions of escape from orderly nature, are characteristic and eternal factors in human psychology, even though very small ones. They exist as permanent realities, and have always expressed themselves in a typical form of art from the earliest fireside folk tales and ballads to the latest achievements of Blackwood and Machen or de la Mare or Dunsany. That art exists—whether the majority like it or not. It is small and limited, but real—and there is no reason why its practitioners should be ashamed of it. Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience—but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to E. Hoffmann Price (15 August 1934) , quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S.T. Joshi, p. 268
Non-Fiction, Letters, to E. Hoffmann Price

Life, Law, Beauty, Art

“There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hard-working artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life’s task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 3, as translated by David Luke

Love, Life, Lie, Perfection