Escapism Quotes

The narrative of so many fairy tales are timeless in so many different cultures, and they have been since the dawn of man. They represent escapism, but they all feature themes that have such poignancy in a modern world. ~ Lily Cole

That's all books are. Escapism borne of wonderfully crafted words that describe far off lands. Sentences that ask and answer within seconds. Paragraphs that slay dragons and ride horses into the midnight sky. Chapters that describe the sensation of pounding hearts and consuming desire, each feeling chronicling the incredible sensation of falling in love. ~ Emma Hart

A studio allows me more freedom. You can create your own sort of reality which is actually more exciting than shooting on location. You can conjure up a complete atmosphere of escapism for the public. ~ Ken Adam

Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically
any way you want to look at it
everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case. ~ Michael Connelly

Internal growth and development were not entirely unaffected by my external environment. No amount of escapism, through either the physical or the mental outlets, could cushion me from the reality of what was taking place. ~ Sara Niles

An escape can become escapism before we even know it. Books are wonderful things, but you can't live in someone else's story. You have to live your own story. ~ Jennifer Donnelly

The best-trained part of us, though, is the mouth, it �is always obediently and devoutly shut. And it's only too true: an open mouth is a yawning fact, the fact that its owner is dwelling with his few thoughts in some other place than the domain and pleasure-garden of attentiveness. ~ Robert Walser

Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners drawing mental maps of escape. ~ Loren Eiseley

Entertainment and escapism - those are the bigger money-making films today. ~ Robin Wright

The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that's the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you'll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone's constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it's - if you'll forgive my language - it's bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that's how they like it. They don't transform, they don't stop to smell the roses, they don't sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood - Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren't waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They're not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel - that's finished. ~ Paul Murray

Coming out of the '60s and the Vietnam War in America, it was commonplace for people to make films that had relevance to them. And since the '70s, cinema has gone almost entirely in the direction of spectacle and escapism and superhero films. ~ Dan Gilroy

I think there seems to be a need for escapism at the moment. maybe that's the type of world we're living in. it's a sanctuary, in a way, where you can immerse yourself in something that doesn't exist, whether that's tv shows or comic books or novels. it's not solely down to magic and vampires - that's in at the moment. but escapism, being a part of other worlds, is very good for you. ~ Colin Morgan

Perhaps fantasy offers imaginative escapism more than other genres. ~ Jasper Fforde

For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table. ~ C.S. Lewis

These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom. ~ Virginia Woolf

Drunkards have a problem, not with sobriety, but with reality. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting. ~ Eric Hoffer

We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable. ~ William Styron

I've indulged all my escapist dreams. I'm here, away from everyone, living it up. Being a selfish and antisocial git. ~ Fennel Hudson

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present. ~ Ross Macdonald

Moreover, people have become accustomed to reading to escape as opposed to reading to think. ~ Leigh M. Lane

Rural and traditional escapism. That's my angle. Places and events where we are free to relax and be ourselves, where nobody tells us to hurry along or conform or grow up. Somewhere we can properly live. ~ Fennel Hudson

In times of struggle, there are as many reasons not to read as there are to breathe. Don't you have bigger things to do? Reading, let alone re-reading, is the terrain of milquetoasts and mopey spinsters. At life's ugliest junctures the very act of opening a book can smack of cowardly escapism. Who chooses to read when there's work to be done?

Call me a coward if you will, but when the line between duty and sanity blurs, you can usually find me curled up with a battered book, reading as if my mental health depended on it. And it does, for inside the books I love I find food, respite, escape, and perspective. ~ Erin Blakemore

I live in my own bubble. I was looking for an audience that wouldn't necessarily be looking for escapism when they came to my comics. ~ Art Spiegelman

Fiction is a vehicle to escapism. But fantasy, in my opinion, is escapism in its most vibrant and enchanting form. ~ S.J. Pierce

A book is a place where my reality, escapism, hope, despair, love and death lie. ~ Nikita Dudani

In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as "escapist" literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even have the disastrous effect on the reader of taking him happily for a few hours out of his own real life in N.W.8. Why this should be a matter for regret I do not know; nor why realism in a novel is so much admired when realism in a picture is condemned as mere photography; nor, I might add, why drink and fornication should seem to bring the realist closer to real life than, say, golf and gardening. ~ A.A. Milne

I passed people shopping or walking their dogs, and young people, university students maybe, busy about their lives, so that the streets I walked seems vibrant to me, more vibrant than my own. But then almost everywhere I went I imagined a place more accommodating of the life I wanted, as if happiness were a matter of streets or parks, as maybe to a point it is; and with R. away for so long I was accustomed to thinking of my real life existing in some distant place or future time, projecting forward in a way that I was afraid might keep me from living fully where I was. ~ Garth Greenwell

One way of understanding a graphic novel is that it's an ambitious comic and one way or another my comics have had ambitions. I have no problem with escapism. When I get my depressions all I want to do is escape reality. ~ Art Spiegelman

We must choose our personal viewpoint. We can embrace a sense of weighty heaviness that comes from knowing that our fate is one of deterioration and death, and our suffering is interminable. Alternatively, we can choose to believe in the unbearable lightness of our being and embrace a world of high-minded thoughts and ideals. The decisions we make are significant regardless if we only have one life to live. We weave our life story out of the choices that we make when confronted with the inevitable opportunities to experience love and friendship and heartache and suffering. During our life, we encounter goodness and evilness, and hope and despair. We must decide whether we accept reality. Alternatively, do we seek to escape the pain that comes from acknowledging the paucity of human existence? ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ...
Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from - hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated. ~ Terry Pratchett

His eyeless skull took in the line of costumes, the waxy debris of the makeup table. His empty nostrils snuffed up the mixed smells of mothballs, grease, and sweat. There was something here, he thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape. And yet... and yet... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from - hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. ~ Terry Pratchett

So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back. ~ Wally Lamb

Fiction is just that–fiction. Yes, it is serious business, but it should also be taken for face value. It's entertainment. It's escapism. It's 365 pages of relaxation. ~ Rachael Wade

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

Imagination doesn't just mean making things up. It means thinking things through, solving them, or hoping to do so, and being just distant enough to be able to laugh at things that are normally painful. Head teachers would call this escapism, but they would be entirely wrong. I would call fantasy the most serious, and the most useful, branch of writing there is. And this is why I don't, and never would, write Real Books. ~ Diana Wynne Jones

I think we love the escapism of something like 'Cinderella,' and I think we do with 'Thor.' ~ Kenneth Branagh

Escapism is survival to me. ~ Johnny Depp

I have to say I do read partly for escapism. Why can't I escape and learn something? ~ Christopher Bollen

It's fogging a little, but I won't slip off and hide in it. No ... never again ... ~ Ken Kesey

Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of imprisonment. ~ Alexander McQueen

Our ability to detect and measure the passage of time is burdensome. The conception and sensation of time bears down upon all of us. It weighs us down; it compresses our souls. There is a variety of ways to escape the dull passage of time or the fearfulness of our accelerating march towards death. We must choose our mechanisms for dealing with the inexorability of time and our finiteness. We can fill our void with work or pleasure, laughter or pain, and fretfulness or courage. We can seek a sense of purposefulness or acknowledge the meaninglessness of life. We can seek to escape the drudgery and pain of life through alcohol, drugs, or pleasure seeking, or by working to support our families and create artistic testaments to our worldly existence. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Many do not have the courage to face the truth of life and instead dwell upon some delusions to escape it. Any such escapism is a major hurdle in spiritual development. ~ Thomas Vazhakunnathu

When people lose their way and lack a real purpose for living they often fall back on certain forms of escapism as a form of self-soothing ... ~ John Geddes

One of the biggest motivations for me with writing my books is to offer girls some escapism, especially girls who really need it, like I did. ~ Meg Cabot

That idea of escapism ... these words could sum up my life. ~ Ella Maillart

Most nights she went with the moon, and when it was round she stayed in my biggest bedroom and wouldn't answer the thing that asked her to let it out
(let you out from where?
let me out from the small, the hot, the take me out of the fire i am ready i am hard like the stones you ate, bitter like those husks)
the moonlight striped her, marked out places where the whispering thing would slip through and she would unfold. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

Would we be so enamored with dystopian fiction if we lived in a culture where violent death was a major concern? It wouldn't be escapism. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I learned a long time ago that life introduces young people to situations they are in no way prepared for, even good girls, lucky girls who want for nothing. Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods. You lose your name because another one is forced on you. You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you. Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds. ~ Roxane Gay

Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn't know. That's why he was devouring two or three books a day - to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life. ~ Philip Roth

I started running to escape the memories that drinking couldn't cover up ~ Dean Karnazes

Bond was escapism, but not meant to be imitated in real life. ~ Roger Moore

My theme is chivalry. I have tried to show that this old tradition is practical and vital. The ideal embodied in Launcelot is 'escapism' in a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word; it offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable. ~ C.S. Lewis

In real life, I'm polite and nice all the time. It's fun to play people who aren't. It's escapism. ~ Rachel Weisz

I wanted to just sink into my media downloads for a while and pretend I didn't exist. ~ Martha Wells

I wondered why people consider escapism so bad, even the escapism on display right then. At first it might appear unseemly, but in the end its lack of pretension gives it its own sort of beauty. ~ Saadat Hasan Manto

Fashion is, after all, a form of escapism, and in fact people are buying more special things than ever, nowadays. They deny and deny themselves, and wait and wait, and then they get sick of it and spend to make themselves feel better. ~ Tom Ford

I think what makes Narnia a magical place is that it offers escapism - escapism from a world that is so different from the reality known by the characters and the reality known by the fans. ~ Will Poulter

We used to have MTV and all these ways we can show our videos, and it was these rap shows, and it was everything. And then it became not cool to be conscious; it became cool to just hang out. Escapism rap became the norm. And, when I say "escapism rap", I mean getting high, get your cars, get your money, get your jewelry, go to the club, have your women, and it just became all about escaping your reality and not making your reality better on a real tip; not just on the have fun tip. ~ Ice Cube

We view art in order to escape our own skins, to get outside of the commotion inside our skulls. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

It was as if the sensory overload that is American life had somehow led to sensory deprivation, a gilded weariness, where everything is permitted and nothing appreciated. ~ J. Maarten Troost

There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

People want fun and escapism at the moment. Look at the success of 'Guardians of the Galaxy'. I think Nolan kick-started a very dark, bleak style of superhero escapism, and I think people have had enough of it. ~ Matthew Vaughn

I think it's misleading to think that art is only there for escapism, only there for our dreams of being rich and f - king whoever we wanna f - k. ~ Saul Williams

Certain parts of me became a little bit forgotten, a little bit numb, a little bit dead, and it was nice to have some dead places in me for a little while, to lose a little bit of my broken mind. ~ Dexter Palmer

Steampunk is...a joyous fantasy of the past, allowing us to revel in a nostalgia for what never was. It is a literary playground for adventure, spectacle, drama, escapism and exploration. But most of all it is fun! ~ George Mann

The only people who hate escapism are jailers. ~ C.S. Lewis

You were trying to find a way to get rid of yourself,
but you were still left with your mouth. ~ Kris Kidd

My books are just pure escapism for kids. ~ Dav Pilkey

I am always writing a potpourri of music. I want to give the world escapism through the wonder of great music and to reach the masses. ~ Michael Jackson

Sniffing glue is a homeless nonbeliever's prayer. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I just wanted to make a record that wasn't escapism. Like, I didn't want to write another record that was devoid of meaningful content. ~ Dan Deacon

A great book provides escapism for me. The artistry and the creativity in a story are better than any drugs. ~ Wentworth Miller

I've loved the escapism of being another person, slipping into another character for a little while. ~ Jeri Ryan

As a mere mortal with thirty years of earthly wanderings, I have found books to be the most significant of my findings. ~ The Raveness

Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents, cousins, bothers, or uncles, and only leave the house to go to the movies or to the nearest bar. "How're you making it?" on may ask, running into them along the block, or in the bar. "Oh, I'm TV-ing it"; with the saddest, sweetest, most shamefaced of smiles, and from a great distance. This distance one is compelled to respect; anyone who has traveled so far will not easily be dragged again into the world. There are further retreats, of course, than the TV screen or the bar. There are those who are simply sitting on their stoops, "stoned," animated for a moment only, and hideously, by the approach of someone who may lend them the money for a "fix." Or by the approach of someone from whom they can purchase it, one of the shrewd ones, on the way to prison or just coming out. ~ James Baldwin

I think escapism is really important. ~ Jordana Brewster

That's what's great about show business. It's escapism. You pay your five bucks to get in and sit there and you're in another world. Forget about the problems in the world. It's wonderful. ~ Michael Jackson

Blake: So what am I missing in books that I can't get through real life experiences?
Evelyn: It's a form of escapism. I long to live in worlds I can only touch through the words of authors. And unfortunately, I don't know how to describe it. It's something you either know the feeling of, or you don't. ~ Rachel Hera

It's to a writer's advantage to contain within himself elements of each sex, or any sex. It's to his advantage because it makes him able to write from the female point of view as well as the male. In some cases, of course, you will find some homosexual writers who can only write from a f - - -'s point of view. But I don't regard myself as a f - - -! Some people may. Also audiences wanted escapism. They don't like too much protest or criticism of their way of life. ~ Tennessee Williams

I think we simply all like to project ourselves into somebody else - somebody who is better-looking, richer, smarter. It's comforting. It's escapism, and that, of course, is what the movies are supposed to be all about. Ultimately, I think it's just part of human nature to pretend. ~ Richard D. Zanuck

I want to glide in a world of beauty,' I said. 'To be carried away into a world of luxurious things. ~ James Lusarde

You break through the veil whenever you strap on a sword or chant the ancient verses. You escape when you write a poem or a tale that brings beauty into the world. You are set free whenever you love - even those who believe you're crazy. ~ Jef Murray

The freedom to be someone else entirely and be different versions of something. That's what I loved and I loved watching movies and I loved watching television, I loved reading books. That kind of escapism into another world was my favorite thing. ~ Gwendoline Christie

Everything we do is escapism, because we'll all be dead and everything we do is completely meaningless. Why brush your teeth? Why not be in the park with the bums passing a short dog? Why pay taxes, why get educated? Of course literature is an escape. You have to fill the hours. ~ T.C. Boyle

Music is energy, emotion, expression, escapism, enlightenment. Music is so much more than just entertainment. ~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

The inartistic methods that we use to blunt anxiety and unartful expedients that we resort to in order to escape pain and numb banality reveals what we dread most, the act of suffering from a mortal loss or the debasement that we earn by wallowing in our decadent acts of escapism. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Books allow us to escape from the pressures of modern life. By far, the best vehicles of escape are Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy genre allowing us to lose ourselves in worlds far away from the reality we know. This escapism works because we totally immerse ourselves and:-

We become the hero or heroine.
We are the ones who thwart evil.
We laugh as we socialise with characters we have never met but feel they are as close as our family.
We cry when we lose a good friend. ~ Peter Graham

Isolation serves as the ideal antidote to the bone-aching stresses of work. ~ Fennel Hudson

Of course fantasy is escapist. Most stories are. So what? Teachers are not meant to be jailers. ~ Terry Pratchett

The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited "escapism" among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life. ~ Michael Chabon

It would be easy to say that I want to play a role that was very much like myself, but more or less with acting, you get to be all these different things, and you aren't trying to be yourself, so it's escapism in a way. ~ Summer Altice

I had always thought it was her way of blinding herself to the messiness of the way we lived. Now I realised it was easier for her mind to go out through the air far above the clouds than to acknowledge the ugliness right before her eyes. ~ Lisa See

An avowal of poverty is no disgrace to any man; to make no effort to escape it is indeed disgraceful. ~ Thucydides

Mysticism has often been misunderstood as the attempt to escape this simple, phenomenal world to a more pure existence in heaven beyond. This is not mysticism, but Gnosticism. Biblical mysticism is the attempt to exit 'this world' to an alternative reality that pervades the old order. Its goal is to jettison the mind-set that says 'greed is good,' selfishness is normal,' and 'killing is necessary.' Mysticism in biblical terms is not escapism, as so many have caricatured it, but a fight for ethics and social change. ~ Walter Wink

The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers ... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape? ~ Neil Gaiman

I studied the lives of jazz singers who would tour Europe, and ... what I learned was life was big ride for them. They'd seen the dark side of humanity ... but touring the world playing jazz, it was a truly carefree way of living. A great escapism, if you like. ~ Gary Carr

Music is escapism, it's entertainment. ~ Andy Taylor

Because we were stranded together and because I stuttered, we read. there is no refuge so private, no asylum more sane. There is no facility of voices captured elsewhere so entire and so marvellous. My tongue was lumpish and fixed, but in reading, silent reading, there was a release, a flight, a wheeling off into the blue spaces of exclamatory experience, diffuse and improbable, gloriously homeless. All that was solid melted into air, all that was air reshaped, and gained plausibility. (p. 43) ~ Gail Jones

I'm not a gamer. But I am very aware of the escapism of drugs. In my mind those kind of do the same thing. They dull us to the aches and pains of our status quo. ~ Joshua Mohr