Escape From Drudgery Quotes

We yearn to be fully immersed in the weightless world of our free spirit's true home, where our playful natures return to us with each sweep of our fantails, and protocol is silenced by a far more joyful call of the sea. ~ Margot Datz

A person who questions the value of living has endured a worthless life committed to trivial pursuits. A disoriented person constantly asks whom they are and where must they go. A stupid person fails to realize basic truths and flees from reality. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

In a musical sense, it seemed like all the good intentions had gone awry, very quickly. I mean, we got back from America and Blur had made The Great Escape, which I thought was a really, truly awful album - so cheesy, like a parody of Parklife, but without the balls or the intellect. And Oasis were enormous and I always found them incredibly dreary. There was this uncritical reverence surrounding the whole thing ~ Justine Frischmann

They have, to be sure, their proportion of ne'er-do-weels, their pedants and lettered fools, but they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; they have not that culture of manner which we instinctively associate with university men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from cultured homes, and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape a certain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie, despite the best of ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

He also said - pointedly - that space travel nowadays was an escape from the problems of Earth. That is, one took off for the stars in the hope that the worst would happen and be done with in one's absence. And indeed I couldn't deny that more than once I had peered anxiously out the porthole - especially when returning from a long voyage - to see whether or not our planet resembled a burnt potato. ~ Stanislaw Lem

Habit has two parts, Toni [Packer] says. There is the habit itself (finger biting, smoking, drinking, whatever), and there is the observer who wants to stop, who is also a habit. And there is the conflict, the battle between the desire to indulge, which is an escape from what is, and the desire to stop, which is also a movement away from what is. ~ Joan Tollifson

On all this Bilbo looked with misery. He had taken his stand on Ravenhill among the Elves - partly because there was more chance of escape from that point, and partly (with the more Tookish part of his mind) because if he was going to be in a last desperate stand, he preferred on the whole to defend the Elvenking. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches because you have seen so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants - their homes, their hobbies - up close. I don't know what it means to grow up with a black president, social networks, omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their natural hair. What I know is that when they loosed the killer of Michael Brown, you said, "I've got to go." And that cut me because, for all our differing worlds, at your age my feeling was exactly the same. And I recall that even then I had not yet begun to imagine the perils that tangle us. You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us.

Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrilling. T ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

We are all such escape artists, you and I. We don't like to get too serious about things, especially about ourselves. When we are with other people, we are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except for what really matters to us, except for our own lives, except for what is going on inside our own skins. We pass the time of day. We chatter. We hold each other at bay, keep our distance from each other even when God knows it is precisely each other that we desperately need. ~ Frederick Buechner

Haven't you noticed most of your fairy tales take place in the woods?" a man a few feet from me says. He stutters and lets a belch escape him. "That's why we're out here. We were hoping Jimmi would bring enough damsels for us all, though! ~ Celia Mcmahon

You have to ignore risks, put your brain on hold and follow your instincts, even when your head insists you do otherwise. Sometimes you got burned. I've signed many times. Roasted once or twice. You have to live with the fire. Because if you start thinking too much or playing safe, you're lost to its wondrous charms forever. You become part of the real world again, the mundane, the ordinary, from where there's no escape. (The Cardinal to Capac Raimi) ~ Darren Shan

Ressentiment is always to some degree a determinant of the romantic type of mind. At least this is so when the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) is not primarily based on the values of that period, but on the wish to escape from the present. Then all praise of the "past" has the implied purpose of downgrading present-day reality. ~ Max Scheler

Just - don't - move," Guy said with his hands spread out in front of him. He looked as if he were trying to catch a wild horse, and did not advance, dismount, or draw his sword.
Just then the portcullis dropped.
"There's no escape," Guy assured him.
From a nearby door, a handful of guards trotted toward Hadrian with their swords drawn.
"Stop!" Guy ordered, raising his hand abruptly. "Don't go near him. Just fan out."
The men waiting in line looked from the soldiers to Hadrian and then backed away.
"I know what you're thinking, Mr. Blackwater," Guy said in an almost friendly tone. "But we truly have you outnumbered this time. ~ Michael J. Sullivan

And Latin America has become very fashionable, yet what repels me is that everyone in Europe goes and imposes themselves there under this mantle of social and socialist cooperation, which in reality is nothing but a disgusting subspecies of European Christian-Socialist fussiness.The Europeans bore themselves to death and meddle every where in the so called Third World in order to escape that fatal European boredom. Missionarianism is a German vice which has invariably just brought misfortune to the world today, which has invariably just plunged the world
into crisis The Church has only poisoned Africa with its detestable dear God, and now it is poisoning Latin America with it. The Catholic Church is the world poisoner the world destroyer, the world annihilator, that is the truth. The Germans continually poison the world outside of
their borders and they will give it no rest until this entire world is fatally poisoned. So I have long withdrawn from my bad habit of wanting to help people in Africa and South America and into myself entirely. There is no helping humanity in our world which has been a hypocrisy for centuries. And, like humanity, there is no helping the World because both are a hypocrisy through and through.
(Goethe Dies, p. 73) ~ Thomas Bernhard

America always seemed to me this foreign land that I imagined I could escape to if I needed to get away - and I think that came both from the fact that I was born there and from watching so many American movies when I was a kid. I was brought up on American films. ~ Andrew Garfield

Drudgery is one of the finest touchstones of character there is. Drudgery is work that is very far removed from anything to do with the ideal - the utterly mean grubby things; and when we come in contact with them we know instantly whether or not we are spiritually real. ~ Oswald Chambers

The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class. ~ John Edward Williams

Reading is a sage way to bump up against life. Reading may be an escape, but it is not an escape from my own life and problems. It is an escape from the narrow boundaries of being only me. Reading in some wonderful ways helps me find out who I am. When she was a young girl Patricia MacLachlan's mother encouraged her to "read a book and find out who you are." And it is true that in some ways reading defines me as it refines me. Reading enlarges my vision of the world; it helps me understand someone who is different from me. It makes me bigger on the inside. We tend to see the world from our own perspective; it is good to see it from the eyes of others. Good literature helps me understand who I am in relation to what others experience. Far from being an escape from reality, good literature is a window into reality. I read to feel life. ~ Gladys M. Hunt

The man's become inhuman, I tell you," said Kemp. "I am as sure he will establish a reign of terror - so soon as he has got over the emotions of this escape - as I am sure I am talking to you. Our only chance is to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head. ~ H.G.Wells

Now that Hillary [Clinton] has won Pennsylvania, it will take a village to help Obama escape from the suffocating embrace of his rival. Certainly Howard Dean will be of no use steering her to the exit. It's like Micronesia telling Russia to denuke. ~ Maureen Dowd

Who says books aren't 'real' friends? We hug them, treasure them, relate to them, spend weekends with them, and bring them along on vacation! They give us escape, comfort, adventures, advice, hope, inspiration, role models, and something to look forward to after a hard day. What more could you ask for from a friend? ~ A.J. Sky

I don't know what's going on with you,' the man says from across the counter, 'but I'm not taking your money.' He blows into a straw and pinches both ends shut.
I shake my head and reach back for my wallet. 'No, I'll pay.'
He winds the straw tighter and tighter. 'I'm serious. It was only a milkshake. And like I said, I don't know what's going on, and I don't know how I can help, but something's clearly gone wrong in your life, so I want you to keep your money.' His eyes search mine, and I know he means it.
I don't know what to say. Even if the words would come, my throat is so tight it won't let them escape. ~ Jay Asher

The drunkard does indeed find escape, he does indeed find short respite and rest, but he returns from the illusion and finds everything as it was before. He has not grown wiser, he has not gained knowledge, he has not climbed any higher. ~ Hermann Hesse

If you have walked into a museum recently - whether you did so to attend an art exhibition or to escape from the police - you may have noticed a type of painting known as a triptych. A triptych has three panels, with something different painted on each of the panels. For instance, my friend Professor Reed made a triptych for me, and he painted fire on one panel, a typewriter on another, and the face of a beautiful, intelligent woman on the third. The triptych is entitled What Happened to Beatrice and I cannot look upon it without weeping.
I am a writer, and not a painter, but if I were to try and paint a triptych entitled The Baudelaire Orphans' Miserable Experiences at Prufrock Prep, I would paint Mr. Remora on one panel, Mrs. Brass on another, and a box of staples on the third, and the results would make me so sad that between the Beatrice triptych and the Baudelaire triptych I would scarcely stop weeping all da ~ Lemony Snicket

If you truly want to escape from everyday life, you've no other choice but to keep evolving. ~ Orihara Izaya

The torment of imprisonment lies in not being able to escape from oneself at any time. ~ Kobo Abe

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. ~ Cyril Connolly

Whenever I come across someone speaking negatively about escapism or looking down on those who seek a temporary escape from this world, I can't help but look at them as absolute fools. To deny someone the right to find temporary peace in escapism is to deny human nature itself as well as all the benefits of such a beautiful concept. Often times, these instances show them saying that "it'll only make things worse" or "it's not gonna change anything", except, a lot of times, that's not the case at all. How many times has someone shut themselves away from the world by listening to a song they hold dear only to return more ready to face the world than before, how many times has someone learned something about themselves through the fictional events of a novel that they wouldn't have other wise, how many times has society experienced great change through people who dreamed of making the world a better place, only to eventually make those dreams into a reality. ~ Justin Allen

Normally when I'm attempting a risky, clandestine, secret date and I need to escape my house undetected, I ask myself, 'What would MacGyver do?'"
Oh, my god, this chick just mentioned MacGyver?
Hell.
Yes.
I break my eyes away from hers long enough to hide the fact that I think I just fell for her and also to assess our escape route. I glance at the swing on the porch, then look back at Six when I'm sure the cheesy grin is gone from my face.
"I think MacGyver would take your porch swing and build an invisible force field out of grass and matches. Then he would attach a jet engine to it and fly it out of here undetected. Unfortunately I'm all out of matches. ~ Colleen Hoover

we were never meant to be what we are or where we are, we are looking for an escape, some music from the sun, the girl we never found. we are betting on the miracle again there before the purple mountains as the horses parade past so much more beautiful than our lives. ~ Charles Bukowski

In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

A single week of Oprah takes you from bondage to all the violent terrors of life, to escape through vicarious encounters with celebrity, to visions of charity and hope, to hard resolve, to redemption and moral renovation. ~ Lee Siegel

Not untill all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son. But in a totalitarian future that has removed procreation from woman's hands, there will also be no affect and no art. Men will be machines, without pain but also without pleasure. Imagination has a price, which we are paying every day. There is no escape from the biologic chains that bind us. ~ Camille Paglia

I can play a lot of things, but I haven't mastered any one. I use music really as a form of raw expression; escape from the real world. ~ Adrian Grenier

Do I advise you to love thy neighbor? I suggest rather to escape from thy neighbor and to love those who are the farthest away from you. Higher than the love for thy neighbor is the love for the man who is distant and has still to come. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

There is no surer mark of a low and unregenerate nature than this tendency of power to loudness and wantonness instead of quietness and reverence. To souls baptized in Christian nobleness the largest sphere of command is but a wider empire of obedience, calling them, not to escape from holy rule, but to its full impersonation. ~ James Martineau

It's awfully good of some people to have asked me to take the job, but I'd rather read about a grand escape than plan one. Besides, I'm terrible at keeping secrets and I hate to scheme against people. It seems rude. I don't deal with guilt well and I'm worried we might hurt some feelings in the process of defending ourselves. Also, I am juggling a couple of books. Being a full-time conspirator would take away from my reading time. ~ Joe Hill

Cement is as impossible to escape as the dust of the earth, you can't tell where it comes from because it's already there. And apart from hunger, the only thing in our minds that's as quick as cement is homesickness. It steals from you the same way cement does, and you can drown in it as well. ~ Herta Muller

The obsessive desire for a passionate relationship is usually a reflection of a lack of love for oneself. The manic need to pursue a passionate career is rooted in an intense unhappiness with present reality. They are a series of soothing thoughts and deflection methods and escape routes: The monster everyone's running from, of course, is themselves. ~ Brianna Wiest

What is meditation? ... It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice wine or fermented coconut-milk. ~ Hermann Hesse

What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial ...
[i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick. ~ Betty Friedan

I don't really know what "intellectual" means, but if it means you've got a desire to learn, you've got a desire to look for things that haven't been presented to you, then, maybe. I think that "intellectual" is quite an exclusive word. I think it's just for anyone that has a thirst or a hunger to improve themselves, or a yearning to escape from somewhere to get to a better place. ~ Pete Doherty

That concentration camps were ultimately provided for the same groups in all countries, even though there were considerable differences in the treatment of their inmates, was all the more characteristic as the selection of the groups was left exclusively to the initiative of the totalitarian regimes: if the Nazis put a person in a concentration camp and if he made a successful escape, say, to Holland, the Dutch would put him in an internment camp. Thus, long before the outbreak of the war the police in a number of Western countries, under the pretext of "national security," had on their own initiative established close connections with the Gestapo and the GPU [Russian State security agency], so that one might say there existed an independent foreign policy of the police. This police-directed foreign policy functioned quite independently of the official governments; the relations between the Gestapo and the French police were never more cordial than at the time of Leon Blum's popular-front government, which was guided by a decidedly anti-German policy. Contrary to the governments, the various police organizations were never overburdened with "prejudices" against any totalitarian regime; the information and denunciations received from GPU agents were just as welcome to them as those from Fascist or Gestapo agents. They knew about the eminent role of the police apparatus in all totalitarian regimes, they knew about its elevated social status and political importance, and they ne ~ Hannah Arendt

I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie ~ Jack London

So you don't trust me: the guy who taught you everything you know. I'm guessing if you have her" - he jerked his thumb at Rae - "that's no accident. Luke's buddies sent her to trap you, and she thought she was doing the right thing, because, duh, she's already proven she's kinda gullible that way."

"Hey!" Rae said.

"You are. Own it. Fix it. Now, you guys have her, which means you escaped whoever sent her after you. You didn't escape without a fight, given that bruise I see rising on Daniel's jaw and the scrapes on Derek's knuckles. But you escaped, and you came back here, and you captured me. Who taught you all that?"

"Daniel and I had already started learning," Maya said, "during those weeks you were chasing us."

"Trial by fire," he said. "Followed by hardcore, hands-on tactical training. You got away scot-free from these guys because of my lessons. And yet now you don't trust I'm on your side?"

"Nope," Derek said.

"Sorry," Daniel said.

Maya crossed her arms and shook her head. I shrugged.

Moreno broke into a grin. "You guys do me proud. I'd give you all a hug, if that wasn't a little creepy. And if I was the hugging sort. But if you survive the rest of this, I'll take you all out for beer and ice cream."

"You don't need to be sarcastic," Rae muttered.

"Oh, but I'm not, and they know it. This is exactly what I trained them for. Trust no one except one another. Exclud ~ Kelley Armstrong

When we seek to escape from inner conflict and pain, we are running away from unresolved childhood trauma or original pain. Most people with serious addictive natures who are in the process of recovery have found that trauma played a huge role in escalating their addictions. It certainly did for me. ~ Christopher Dines

From the beginnings of Israelite religion the belief that God had chosen this particular people to carry out His mission has been both a cornerstone of Hebrew faith and a refuge in moments of distress. And yet, the prophets felt that to many of their contemporaries this cornerstone was a stumbling block; this refuge, an escape. They had to remind the people that chosenness must not be mistaken as divine favoritism or immunity from chastisement, but, on the contrary, that it meant being more seriously exposed to divine judgment and chastisement. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky