Selected escapism quotes

1. I never miss reality when I'm not in it, but it's sometimes nice to come back to.

2. Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.

3. Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

4. 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.

5. The Bucket List is a movie about two old codgers who are nothing like people, both suffering from cancer that is nothing like cancer, and setting off on adventures that are nothing like possible. I urgently advise hospitals: Do not make the DVD available to your patients; there may be an outbreak of bedpans thrown at TV screens.

6. Saloons provide moments of genuine ecstasy - but only if your soul is at peace and the rest of your life bears contemplating. Otherwise, they are palaces of misery.

7. Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.

8. I have abandoned my search for truth, and am now looking for a good fantasy.

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

10. One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.

11. The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

12. There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

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

14. Castles in the air - they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build, too.

15. It is all well and good for children and acid freaks to still believe in Santa Claus - but it is still a profoundly morbid day for us working professionals. It is unsettling to know that one out of every twenty people you meet on Xmas will be dead this time next year... Some people can accept this, and some can't. That is why God made whiskey, and also why Wild Turkey comes in $300 shaped canisters during most of the Christmas season.'

16. Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

17. My father said 'When in doubt, castle.'

18. Oh many a peer of England brews Livelier liquor than the Muse, And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man. Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think.

19. People deserve... the truth. They deserve honesty. The best music, you can seek some shelter in it momentarily, but it's essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

20. Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.

21. 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.

22. I like people to go away from a Queen show feeling fully entertained. I think Queen songs are pure escapism, like going to see a good film.

23. Drink today, and drown all sorrow; You shall perhaps not do't tomorrow.

24. As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair. [citation needed]

25. I don't want the public to see the world they live in while they're in the Park. I want to feel they're in another world.

26. Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water rats; There we've hid our faery vats, Full of berries And of reddest stolen cherries. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

27. Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.

28. It seemed to her that certain portions of the earth must produce happiness -- as thought it were a plant native only to those soils and doomed to languish elsewhere. Why couldn't she be leaning over the balcony of some Swiss chalet? Or nursing her melancholy in a cottage in Scotland, with a husband clad in a long black velvet coat and wearing soft leather shoes, a high-crowned hat and fancy cuffs?

29. 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.

30. 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.)

31. 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.

32. 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.

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

34. Back in my 20s, I was playing poker to avoid living. I wasn't very satisfied with life. I used to play in a big game in Archway. And we'd play as much as we possibly could and for as much money as we had, and that went on for a couple of years.

35. Films take me to places I never thought I would get to, and over walls that I never thought I could get over. When I think about that it's just... I dunno... I forgot. [...] Let's be real. I forgot. And I was almost there. It was really gonna be good.

36. Let's swim to the moon, uh huh Let's climb through the tide Penetrate the evenin' that the City sleeps to hide

37. 'Man's craving for the supernatural is as natural as our discounting of the present moment... The natural becomes trite and commonplace to us and we take refuge in an imaginary world above and beyond it.' (p.261}

38. When you sit at home comfortably folded up in a chair beside a fire, have you ever thought what goes on outside there? Probably not. You pick up a book and read about things and stuff, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You're doing it now, getting ready to fill in a normal life with the details of someone else's experiences. Fun, isn't it? You read about life on the outside thinking about how maybe you'd like it to happen to you, or at least how you'd like to watch it. Even the old Romans did it, spiced their life with action when they sat in the Coliseum and watched wild animals rip a bunch of humans apart, reveling in the sight of blood and terror. They screamed for joy and slapped each other on the back when murderous claws tore into the live flesh of slaves and cheered when the kill was made. Oh, it's great to watch, all right. Life through a keyhole. But day after day goes by and nothing like that ever happens to you so you think that it's all in books and not in reality at all and that's that. Still good reading, though. Tomorrow night you'll find another book, forgetting what was in the last and live some more in your imagination. But remember this: there are things happening out there. They go on every day and night making Roman holidays look like school picnics. They go on right under your very nose and you never know about them. Oh yes, you can find them all right. All you have to do is look for them. But I wouldn't if I were you because you won't like what you'll find. Then again, I'm not you and looking for those things is my job. They aren't nice things to see because they show people up for what they are. There isn't a coliseum any more, but the city is a bigger bowl, and it seats more people. The razor-sharp claws aren't those of wild animals but man's can be just as sharp and twice as vicious. You have to be quick, and you have to be able, or you become one of the devoured, and if you can kill first, no matter how and no matter who, you can live and return to the comfortable chair and the comfortable fire. But you have to be quick. And able. Or you'll be dead.

39. Leave the acid kids in their green fishbowls today.

40. So pleased with a daydream, that now living's no good.

41. Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal... unnable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort, the trifling feeling of escape experienced at a masked ball. He distances himself from that which he feels and sees. He invents. He transfigures. He mythifies. He creates. He fancies himself an artist. He imitates, in his small way, the painters he claims are mad.

42. Accuracy is vexing to a crowd of would-be fantasizers. Hasn't our age coined the term 'escapism,' when in fact the only way to escape oneself is to allow oneself to be invaded?

43. 'Last night I saw you in my dreams/Now I can't wait to go to sleep/And this life is all a dream/So my real life starts when I go to sleep.'

44. This is the very contrary of dropping out. Most people can't wait to get home to their house or apartment and shut that door and turn on the TV. To me, that's dropping out.

45. Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there aren't no Ten Commandments, an' a man can raise a thirst.