Selected escape quotes

1. Build yourself a book-nest to forget the world without.

2. I liked myself better when I wasn't me.

3. Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

4. The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment. Whither they are led is of secondary importance.

5. When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim's body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.

6. Both Einstein and Freud were clever in leaving Germany, because both of them would doubtlessly have been caught by Himmler and murdered.

7. History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

8. They say a woman's place Is to wait and serve Under the veil Submissive and dear But I think my place Is in a ship from space To carry me The hell out of here.

9. Some on commission, some for the love of learning, Some because they have nothing better to do Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden The drumming of the demon in their ears.

10. A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

11. Thus night with all her snares passed through the upper world and baited all heads sweetly, fed all foolish hopes, for night can bring to men all shrewish day denies, wrapped as a gift in the green leaves of opiate dream.

12. Well I've got to get out of the rat-race now I'm tired of the ways of mice and men And the empires all turning into rust again. Out of everything nothing remains the same That's why I'm cloud hidden Cloud hidden Whereabouts unknown.

13. Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze, A visitant that while it fans my cheek Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings From the green fields, and from yon azure sky. Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come To none more grateful than to me; escaped From the vast city, where I long had pined A discontented sojourner: now free, Free as a bird to settle where I will.

14. To me, music was about being accepted and escaping from this crummy existence.

15. Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon.

16. And if I drink oblivion of a day, So shorten I the stature of my soul.

17. The last thing I wanted to do was put politics into my music . . . because music was my escape.

18. I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

19. No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.

20. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

21. The world's in a bad way, my man, And bound to be worse before it mends; Better lie up in the mountain here Four or five centuries, While the stars go over the lonely ocean...

22. Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium!

23. Last dance with Mary Jane, one more time to kill the pain. I feel summer creepin' in and I'm tired of this town again.

24. All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

25. What the hell are they all looking for? A way out. A way to the right way out. A way to leave. A way to go. A way to have had it, to have had enough of it, to be done with it. A decent way to give it all over to the giver of it all.

26. When you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.

27. And in the lonely cool before dawn, you hear their engines roaring on. But when you get to the porch they're gone On the wind, so Mary climb in. It's a town full of losers and I'm pulling out of here to win.

28. But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchaned garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

29. Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities for escape, again, are as many as hiding places.

30. The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.

31. My father rarely spoke of life before [he left Cuba]. About prison, he jsut said, 'That man is a genius at PR.' Castro would come to the jail in the middle of the night and ask the prisoners, 'What are you doing here? Don't you see we're trying to do the right thing?' The reason I'm not more political is because I have music. And from a young age, I needed it. After prison, my father came to America, joined the Army, fought in Vietnam -- and was exposed to Agent Orange. He died a slow, horrible death. Music was my escape.

32. If I seem free, it's because I'm always running.

33. The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt That must, as if it had not holy blood Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud, Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays That have to be set up in fifty ways, On the day's war with every knave and dolt, Theatre business, management of men. I swear before the dawn comes round again I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

34. Roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair. Well the night's busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere. We've got one last chance to make it real, to trade in these wings on some wheels. Climb in back, heaven's waiting down on the tracks.

35. 'What's more delightful than an evening beside the fire with a nice bright lamp and a book, listening to the wind beating against the windows?' 'How true!' she said, her great dark eyes fixed widely on him. 'I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times,' he said. 'The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of -- I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters -- I live and breathe with them.'

36. 'I wish I had been born a bird instead,' he said. 'I wish we had all been born birds instead.'

37. Yet now despair itself is mild, Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me, And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.

38. Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

39. We have assembled inside this ancient & insane theatre To propagate our lust for life & flee the swarming wisdom of the streets

40. I want to wake up with the rain Falling on a tin roof While I'm safe there in your arms So all I ask is for you To come away with me in the night Come away with me

41. I waited for a bus To separate the both of us And take me off far away from you 'Cause my feelings never change a bit I always feel like shit I don't know why; I guess that I 'just do'

42. For a long time I've been walking down life's road with my two pals, Bad Luck and Bad Choices. Fortunately I'm a big believer in new beginnings, new friends, and running from my problems. So one day I decided to head for the island. Aloha, my name is Jack.

43. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was heading in the same direction, disguised as an International Red Cross doctor, if disguise was possible for a man nearly seven feet tall with a face slashed with scars. He knew of plans to use escape routes through the Alps, but he was not sure if his old friend Martin Bormann could help. He had a rendezvous with Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucrat who took the view that the subhuman breeds should be exterminated. His fellow Austrian Otto Skorzeny had already gone to earth in the region. Earlier when Kaltenbrunner had been asked what to do about syphilitic prostitutes, he had said (with all the majesty of the law behind him as Heydrich's successor): 'Bury them.'

44. 'Fuck today, it's tomorrow.'

45. We went back [to Cuba] once, in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter gave the opportunity for people with family members to go. We went to help get Emilio's only brother and his two kids [one of whom, Lili, is la Flaca from Univision's El Gordo y la Flaca] out. We got them a visa through Costa Rica, but when Emilio's brother announced that he was leaving, [the government] starting taking repressive measures against him, so he went into hiding for two months until they were able to leave. While we were there, Emilio and I bought them things they didn't even know existed, like apples and olives, from the diplotiendas [stores open only to tourists]. To this day, Lili has an olive fetish.

46. At last she was going to know the joys of love, the fever of the happiness she had despaired of. She was entering a marvelous realm where all would be passion, ecstasy, rapture: she was in the midst of an endless blue expanse, scaling the glittering heights of passion; everyday life had receded, and lay far below, in the shadows between those peaks.

47. A mad idea seized her: he was gazing at her now! She was sure of it! She long to rush into his arms and seek refuge in his strength as in the very incarnation of love; she longed to cry: 'Ravish me! Carry me off! Away from here! All my passion and all my dreams are yours -- yours alone!' The curtain fell.

48. I think my escape from the Siberian Transport was my most difficult performance. I was placed in the great vault usually assigned to political prisoners, and when the great door was shut, I had the hardest time of my life, perhaps, in releasing myself. But nevertheless, it took me 18 minutes to walk out, and face the dazed officials.

49. But me they'll lash me in hammock, drop me deep. Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep. I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there? Just ease this darbies at the wrist, and roll me over fair, I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.

50. The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the election results as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms. There had to be a whole new scene, they said, and the only way to do it was to make the big move - either figuratively or literally - from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury, from pragmatism to mysticism, from politics to dope... The thrust is no longer for 'change' or 'progress' or 'revolution,' but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been.

51. Hey all you little waves run away. Mmm... run away.

52. This little girl inside me Is retreating to her favourite place. Go into the garden. Go under the ivy, Under the leaves, Away from the party. Go right to the rose. Go right to the white rose (For me.)

53. After a thousand songs on the theme of boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl or Thatcher's Britain, exposure to her music comes as an imaginative release as we go giddily flying into the limitless possibilities of the poetic viewpoint. Here is talk of whales, of Peter Pan, kites, Houdini, mysticism... Acquaintances have observed, 'She lives in a world of her own.' But it's a world that lives within all of us, and her songs shine light into neglected areas of our minds.

54. The politics of rock 'n' roll, in England or America or anywhere else, is that a whole lot of kids want to be fried out of their skins by the most scalding propulsion they can find, for a night they can pretend is the rest of their lives, and whether the next day they go back to work in shops or boredom on the dole or American TV doldrums in Mom 'n' Daddy's living room nothing can cancel the reality of that night in the revivifying flames when for once if only then in your life you were blasted out of yourself and the monotony which defines most life anywhere at any time, when you supped on lightning and nothing else in the realms of the living or dead mattered at all.

55. I hied me off to Arcady- The month it was the month of May, And all along the pleasant way, The morning birds were mad with glee, And all the flowers sprang up to see, As I went on to Arcady.

56. 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.

57. where in hell can you go far from the things that you know far from the sprawl of concrete that keeps crawling its way about 1,000 miles a day?

58. I had to go to the store, I had decided, to bring back some apples - and I went past the store that sold apples and I kept driving, and driving. I was going south, and west, because if I went north or east I would run out of world too soon.

59. Why did I come? I didn't come. I went. I wasn't coming here, to meet these people. I was leaving there. Getting away. Only I tricked myself.

60. But was there really any place on earth where he could be free of this?

61. Whenever I hear you saying, rise and shine, rise and shine, it makes me think how lucky dead people are!

62. So I sold the town away, I couldn't wait to forget you, I was killed in half a day, I hadn't time to regret you, ~ 'Life On A Chain'

63. You will remember (you WILL remember!) Where you could go (you WILL remember!) When you would go Away. ~ 'When You See The Light'

64. The struggle for existence in a universe we did not choose, and the burden of being a member of the only race which values objective, verifiable truth as an end in itself, makes us sometimes long for escape from reality -- in some cases through a literature of the fantastic, of marvelous dream worlds, of free-ranging fantasy. But we must not confuse that necessary escape with what is real. Permit me to suggest to the reader that it is a waste of his time and energy to play with fantasies that lack the literary and aesthetic charm of poetry and imaginative prose fiction.

65. I used to stay out in the forests and on the mountain and I would wake up before daylight to pray in the snow, in icy coldness, in rain, and I used to feel neither ill nor any slothfulness, because, as I now see, the Spirit was burning in me at that time. And it was there of course that one night in my sleep I heard a voice saying to me: 'You do well to fast: soon you will depart for your home country.' And again, a very short time later, there was a voice prophesying: 'Behold, your ship is ready.' And it was not close by, but, as it happened, two hundred miles away, where I had never been nor knew any person. And shortly thereafter I turned about and fled from the man with whom I had been for six years, and I came, by the power of God who directed my route to advantage (and I was afraid o nothing), until I reached that ship.

66. 'Running in the street conveys an impression of terror. The victim's fall is already mimed in his attempt to escape it. The position of the head, trying to hold itself up, is that of a drowning man, and the straining face grimaces as if under torture. He has to look ahead, can hardly glance back without stumbling, as if treading the shadow of a foe whose features freeze the limbs.'

67. This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity. But the Rocket engine, the deep cry of combustion that jars the soul, promises escape. The victim, in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape.... Moving now toward the kind of light where at last the apple is apple-colored. The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple. Everything is where it is, no clearer than usual, but certainly more present. So much has to be left behind now, so quickly.

68. Come here my love And I will lift my spirits high for you I'd like to fly away and spend a day or two Just contemplating the fields and leaves and talking about nothing Just layin' down in shades of effervescent, effervescent odors And shades of time and tide.

69. Got my ticket at the airport Well I guess I've been marking time I've been living in another country That operates along entirely different lines Keep me away from porter or whiskey Don't play anything sentimental it'll make me cry I've got to go back my friend Is there really any need to ask why?

70. Cessi et sublato montes genitore petivi.

71. Can I quit now? Can I come home?

72. Polly wants a cracker Think I should get off her first, Think she wants some water To put out the blow torch.

73. Yeah, I was run out of town. They chased me up to the castle of Aberdeen with torches. Just like the Frankenstein monster. And I got away in a hot air balloon. And I came here to Seattle. (1992)

74. It's a picture perfect evening And I'm staring down the sun Fully loaded, deaf, and dumb And done waiting for sedation to disconnect my head Or any situation where I'm better off than dead

75. Throughout theological history we have been assured by religious leaders that if we perform certain rituals, repeat certain prayers or mantras, conform to certain patterns, suppress our desires, control our thoughts, sublimate our passions, limit our appetites and refrain from sexual indulgence, we shall, after sufficient torture of the mind and body, find something beyond this little life. And that is what millions of so-called religious people have done through the ages, either in isolation, going off into the desert or into the mountains or a cave or wandering from village to village with a begging bowl, or, in a group, joining a monastery, forcing their minds to conform to an established pattern. But a tortured mind, a broken mind, a mind which wants to escape from all turmoil, which has denied the outer world and been made dull through discipline and conformity-such a mind, however long it seeks, will find only according to its own distortion.

76. Caro m' e 'l sonno, e piu l'esser di sasso, Mentre che 'l danno e la vergogna dura: Non veder, non sentir, m' e gran ventura; Pero non mi destar, deh! parla basso

77. Ophelia's mind went wandering you'd wonder where she'd gone through secret doors down corridors she'd wander them alone

78. If you get tired of just hanging around Pick up a guitar, spin a web of sound And then you could be strung out all day With lovers and clowns Now I find myself still hanging around

79. See they ask me if I shed a tear, I ain't lie/See you gotta get high or die, cause even thugs cry

80. When this old world gets me down and there's no love to be found I close my eyes and soon I find I'm in a playground in my mind Where the children laugh and the children play And we sing a song all day.

81. Upon a darkened night the flame of love was burning in my breast And by a lantern bright I fled my house while all in quiet rest. Shrouded by the night and by the secret stair I quickly fled. The veil concealed my eyes while all within lay quiet as the dead.

82. The gipsy tents are on the down, The gipsy girls are here; And it's O to be off and away from the town With a gipsy for my dear!

83. And I'm glad you got away, But I'm still stuck out here, My clothes are soaking wet, From your brother's tears.

84. See the sterile soil Poisoned sky Yellow water Final scraps of light bringing new tears So wake, baby, wake But leave that blanket round you There's nowhere as safe I'm leaving this place But there is nothing I'm planning to take Just you, just you.

85. We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thogught we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.

86. Then a overflowing desire comes to me, absurd, of a sort of satanism before Satan, in that one day [...] an escape out of God can be found and the deepest of us stops, I don't know how, to be a part of being or not being.

87. All things considered, I could never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music. For I seemed condemned to the society of Germans. If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take to hashish. Well, I had to take to Wagner...

88. Villain, a horse-- Villain, I say, give me a horse to fly, To swim the river, villain, and to fly.

89. Macheath: And I would love you all the day, Polly: Every night would kiss and play, Macheath: If with me you'd fondly stray Polly: Over the hills and far away.

90. Strangely, even when I was miserable in my own life, I usually loved being on a film set and I truly revelled in the atmosphere of working with the director and the actors in creating something. Making films was always a refuge for me because I was totally focused on the work and not thinking about my own problems. (2004)

91. If there's anything I really want, it's privacy. Maybe I should do what Brando did 30 years ago - buy an island. Maybe take my girl and some friends and just go there and sleep. And read, and swim and think clear thoughts. Because you really can't do that here. You can't be normal: you can't just hang out and have a cup of coffee and pick your nose. (1999)

92. He was within a few hours of giving his enemies the slip forever.

93. Judas had given them the slip.

94. The only victory over love is flight.

95. It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

96. I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.

97. The only creative thought one can have in an institution is how to get out.

98. He then gave a hideous laugh and added that, if anybody was interested in his plans, he was going to join the Foreign Legion, that cohort of the damned in which broken men may toil and die and dying, forget. 'Beau Widgeon?' said the Egg, impressed. 'What ho!'

99. Were I a cloud I'd gather My skirts up in the air, And fly I well know whither, And rest I well know where.

100. I'd like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better.