Chance Escape Quotes

Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape. ~ Frank Moore Colby

To all parties present and participating in the life of the country, Aunt Alexandra was one of the last of her kind: she had river-boat, boarding-school manners; let any moral come along and she would uphold it; she was born in the objective case; she was an incurable gossip. When Aunt Alexandra went to school, self-doubt could not be found in any textbook, so she knew not its meaning. She was never bored, and given the slightest chance she would exercise her royal prerogative: she would arrange, advise, caution, and warn. She never let a chance escape her to point out the shortcomings of other tribal groups to the greater glory of our own, a habit that amused Jem rather than annoyed him: Aunty better watch how she talks - scratch most folks in Maycomb and they're kin to us. ~ Harper Lee

Where death follows, there's life. When darkness surrounds you in a world of chaos, search and you'll eventually find the light. ~ Lee Argus

I love the way folktale and fantasy tap into the roots of story telling. The paradox, for me, is that by moving a story into the fantastic we can actually bring it closer to the reader, not move it further away. It is more than an escape. When we read of the only daughter of a fisherman (or the third son of a woodcutter) in a fairy tale, we are all that character. That's the underlying pulse beat of such tales. Using the fantastic as a prism for the past, if done properly, removes the tale from distancing specificity. It can't just be read as unique to a time and place; it is universalized in interesting, powerful ways. When I wrote Tigana, about the way tyranny tries to erase identity in conquered peoples, the fantasy setting seems to have done exactly that: I'm asked in places ranging from Korea to Poland to Croatia to Quebec, "Were you writing about us?"

I was. All of them. That is the point. The fantastic is a tool in the writer's arsenal, as potentially powerful as any there is, and any tool we have works to the benefit of the reader. ~ Guy Gavriel Kay

{...} I was okay with things the way they were. No, not okay: I longed and suffered and pined with the rest of humanity. Sometimes I was happy enough with the book I was reading or the book I was writing, and the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day. But most of the time I was just plain dying to get out. All I needed - all I have ever needed - was someone to challenge me, to serve as a goad, an instigator, a stirrer of the pot. I hated trouble, but I loved troublemakers. I hated chance and uncertainty, but I was drawn to those who showed up on your doorstep with their own pair of dice. ~ Michael Chabon

You've got as much chance of winning in there as finding a pair of balls on a Brahma bull. ~ Kenneth Eade

Opera needs to be a total escape from real life. To relate to what we're going through today is fine and dandy, but it's really about being transported and completely swept away by a romantic notion. ~ Rufus Wainwright

He knew that some decisions in life are made before you ever have a chance to think them through. And sometimes that's a good thing. ~ Morgan Parker

Governments that block the aspirations of their people, that steal or are corrupt, that oppress and torture or that deny freedom of expression and human rights should bear in mind that they will find it increasingly hard to escape the judgement of their own people, or where warranted, the reach of international law. ~ William Hague

It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he had the chance.
Pity? It is pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me Gollum has some part to play in this, for good or evil ... (not finished yet) ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The point being made here is that hostages and outsiders view the hostages' ability to escape differently. What looks to outsiders as an opportunity for escape may look like a test (a trick) or a death trap to hostages. It is hostages', not outsiders', perceptions of hostages' ability to escape that determines whether or not hostages develop Stockholm Syndrome. ~ Dee L.R. Graham

I was shocked by the reaction I got for Bleak House. It was very intensive but one of the best jobs of my life. It was a chance to play a character that grows and develops and I was very enmeshed in it. But I didn't realise how stylish it was and how much people would love it. ~ Anna Maxwell Martin

I can say is if anyone gets a chance to work with [Dr.]Dre, it's a moment you will always take with you throughout your career. And as of right now, the Compton album is the only thing to talk about. ~ Kendrick Lamar

If you chance upon a big, gray cate, you probably owe him a favor. Even if you do not remember the favor,do it, anyway. In the long run, you will do it, but it will be far less painful if you do it up front. ~ Julie Kagawa

Your will cannot always choose the path; very often the route is determined by chance or by the will of others. ~ Fausto Cercignani

Sometimes when you're relegated to your neighborhood, you forget that there's more important things than your neighborhood going on out in the world. ~ Ice Cube

You cannot escape from the biological law of cause and effect - food choices are the most significant cause of disease and premature death. ~ Joel Fuhrman

Some lives were saved by accident; some, by an accident. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The current technological and scientific revolution implies not that authentic individuals and authentic realities can be manipulated by algorithms and TV cameras, but rather that authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don't realise that they are already trapped inside a box – their brain – which is locked within a bigger box – human society with its myriad fictions. When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix. When the peasants and workers revolted against the tsar in 1917, they ended up with Stalin; and when you begin to explore the manifold ways the world manipulates you, in the end you realise that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Do you really think that Walter has a chance of becoming president in two years?"
"Yes, I do. I believe that, in the next few years, we are likely to experience a war between a large population of disenfranchised, jobless, Western Caucasian men and everyone else. The status quo is being disrupted, and they don't like it. Don't expect them to give up power willingly. The forces you challenge are dangerous and don't play fair or clean. ~ Jamie Le Fay

Effective listening is more than simply avoiding the bad habit of interrupting others while they are speaking or finishing their sentences. It's being content to listen to the entire thought of someone rather than waiting impatiently for your chance to respond. ~ Richard Carlson

Let us be thankful for the fools,' Mark Twain wrote with typically dark humor in 1897. 'But for them the rest of us could not succeed.' Of all the paradoxes of failure in America, surely this is the darkest. Long ago, we saw through old fables of rags to riches; it is still fun to dream, but we know that we are partaking of a cultural myth. But if we do not quite believe in that kind of success, our faith in the myths of failure is unshaken. We are merrily cynical about whether the average tycoon really tugged on those bootstraps, but we still believe with deadly seriousness that the reasons for failure are usually individual-- "in the man." Failure is not the dark side of the American Dream; it is the foundation of it. The American Dream gives each of us the chance to be a born loser. ~ Scott A. Sandage

The percent likelihood of a society becoming physically violent if it is physically affectionate towards its infants and tolerant of premarital sexual behavior is 2 percent. The probability of this relationship occurring by chance is 125,000 to one. I am not aware of any other developmental variable that has such a high degree of predictive validity. ~ James W. Prescott

Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp's "Fountain"-urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen. ~ Charles Simic

No, you're the girl I'm in love with. I love you more than my own life," Jack declared fervently. "If anything happens to you Maia, it will be over for me. I'm never gonna come back from losing you - not in ten, not in fifty years. So I'm asking you not to throw away what we have on some fucking job someone else can do. I'm begging you to give what we have a chance. You've done your time; it's OK to slow down, babe. I promise you, I'll make it my life's priority to make you happy."
~Jack to Maia ~ Victoria Paige

Children are being killed, because some "adults" think life is a game.

Something is amiss.

When children shoot up other children in school, it's a national tragedy, and a week of mourning.

When grown men are killing unarmed young, yes unarmed young, it bespeaks the leagues of fear residing in these men's hearts; that they've created a world in which they themselves have become useless.

Then it makes front page, and it becomes business as usual.

Something is amiss here.

If adults don't truly grow up, then their young may never get the chance. ~ Justin K. McFarlane Beau

To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. ~ Eugene B. Sledge

It struck me, sharp and hard, that I had been given so many chances to save my soul that my entire life had been constructed around these chances! That was my nature - going from temptation to temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed. ~ Anne Rice

The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die. ~ Robert M. Hutchins

All my work will explode inside my body, each fragment of my anatomy will acquire a life of its own, outside mine, Humberto won't exist, only these monsters, the despot who imprisoned me at La Rinconada to force me to invent him, Ines's honey complexion, Brigida's death, Iris Mateluna's hysterical pregnancy, the saintly girl who was never beatified, Humberto Penaloza's father pointing out Don Jeronimo dressed up to go to the Jockey Club, and your benign, kind hand, Mother Benita, that does not and will not let go of mine, and your attention fixed on these words of a mute, and your rosaries, the Casa's La Rinconada as it once was, as it is now, as it was afterwards, the escape, the crime, all of it alive in my brain, Peta Ponce's prism refracting and confusing everything and creating simultaneous and contradictory planes, everything without ever reaching paper, because I always hear voices and laughter enveloping and tying me up. ~ Jose Donoso

At first it seemed to be no more than a chance ray of light beamed into the vestibule by the shifting of a tree-bough between house and street lamp, but as we kept our eyes glued to it we saw that it was a form - a tall, attenuated, skeletally-thin form moving stealthily in the shadow.

Slowly the thing emerged from the gloom of the doorway, and despite the warning I had had, I felt a prickling sensation at the back of my neck just above my collar, and a feeling as of sudden chill ran through my forearms. It was tall, as we had been told, fully six feet from its bare-boned feet to hairless, parchment-covered skull; and the articulation of its skeleton could be seen plainly through the leathery skin that clung to the gaunt, staring bones. The nose was large, high-bridged and haughty, like the beak of a falcon or eagle, and the chin was prominent beneath the brownish sheath of skin that stretched drum-tight across it. The eyes were closed and showed only as twin depressions in the skull-like countenance, but the mummified lips had retracted to show a double line of teeth in a mirthless grin. Its movements were irregular and stiff, like the movements of some monstrous mechanical doll or, as Edina Laurace had expressed it, like a marionette worked by unseen wires. But once it had emerged from the doorway it moved with shocking quickness. Jerkily, and with exaggeratedly high knee-action, it crossed the lawn, came to the sidewalk, turned on its parchment-soled feet as if ~ Seabury Quinn

When you're a kid you just think about where you are going to be to put yourself in a position for the next scoring chance. But as you develop, you start to do things that may not catch the eye of the normal football watcher, the dropping back, the closing down. ~ Michael Owen

The part always has a tendency to reunite with its whole in order to escape from its imperfection. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street. ~ Milan Kundera

I prepare for my fights to well that I don't wanna give a chance to my opponent to crash my 'glass chin' as they say, so I'm knocking them in the way that I like. ~ Wladimir Klitschko

The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others. ~ Colson Whitehead

As soon as she'd met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her. ~ David Nicholls

I might love my e-reader, but I'd never pass up the chance to browse real books. ~ Nichole Chase