Reading Escape Quotes

There was, for many of us, a great escape in reading about the fantastic and supernatural during wartime. Terrors more terrible than those we were living through gave us an outlet for our anxiety. ~ M.J. Rose

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else - grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets. ~ Alessandra Torre

For me, reading was always the great escape without getting your fingers burnt. ~ Geri Halliwell

I thought of all the summer evenings I'd spent sitting in the chairs under the trees beside the trailer, reading books that helped me escape Creek View, at least for a little while. Magical kingdoms, Russian love triangles, and the March sisters couldn't have been further away from the trailer park. ~ Heather Demetrios

It was cool to see reading become such a transparent act - it was as if her face had a different expression for each punctuation mark, and when there was dialogue you could see her actually listening to it in her head. ~ David Levithan

Gotten a good look at her face. But they didn't recognize her as Stark's cohort. They must not have been big on reading blogs or watching the news. Deirdre took the camera. "Sure. Where's the button?" He quickly showed her how to operate it, and Deirdre stepped back to get both of them in the frame. The camera had a telephoto lens. She aimed it at the top of the building, zooming in so that she could look at the skeletal upper levels, where they were preparing to moor a visiting dirigible. With such fantastic zoom, she could see that there were OPA guards in black suits waiting to receive the airship. ~ S.M. Reine

I've always been very grateful that enough people have enjoyed reading what I've written that I've been able to pursue writing professionally. ~ Christopher Paolini

Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are. ~ Adam Zagajewski

The library serves as a gathering place for friends who
share the love of books. It further serves as a resource for those who escape the pressure of everyday
life, doing it by losing themselves in the written word. ~ Kristen Ashley

The one constant in my life has been my love of books: reading them, thinking about them, talking about them, holding them, turning people on to new ones. ~ Maria Semple

I like to think I've written something worth reading when I cry the tears of the characters. ~ Carla H. Krueger

I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.

I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, a ~ Frederick Douglass

I'm not good at reading reviews and things like that. ~ Mary Elizabeth Ellis

You're not going to see any former suitors in Forest Crest, are you?"
An impish twinkle appeared in her eyes. "No, Mr. Morgan, I was never courted by any of the village lads."
"Why not? What in God's name is the matter with all of them?"
"I was never receptive to their advances," Victoria said, settling herself more comfortably on his lap. "I was absorbed in taking care of Father, and reading books, and..." Tenderly she laid her head on his shoulder. "I suppose I was waiting for you," she said, and felt his arms tighten until he nearly crushed her. ~ Lisa Kleypas

You look at Vladimir Radmanovic, this guy is cut from stone. As if Michelangelo was reading and a lightening bolt flashed before him. ~ Bill Walton

You can recognize in your own reading habits what writers are doing that works and what doesn't. I'm becoming much more aware of that after reading a decade of student stories. ~ Dan Chaon

My late husband and I started our sons off as readers at a very young age. Today, they are voracious readers. ~ Soraya Diase Coffelt

Sometimes we have to try on a few different personalities before we found ourselves. ~ Lindsey Kelk

Reading great books always gives me the worst sleeping disorders. ~ Love The Stacks Bookstore

But at the time I didn't know that it would take more to escape black-and-white thinking than just no longer attending your parents' church. The church had provided me a sorting system, which was now ingrained. It had containers into which every person and idea and event was to be placed. ~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

Reading God's Word and receiving the knowledge of Jesus Christ renews the believer's mind and transforms it to His mind. The minds of immature believers will be focused on selfish ambitions, but as they open themselves up to read the Word concerning Jesus, they enter into fellowship with Him and their thinking begins to change--to be renewed. As a result of such a renewing of the mind, they spontaneously start to look out for the interest of others and to genuinely and unselfishly care for others; they do not consider themselves better than everyone else. ~ Henry Hon

Reader, what are you doing? Aren't you going to resist? Aren't you going to escape? Ah, you are participating ... Ah, you fling yourself into it, too ... You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters? Like this, without any preparation..? ~ Italo Calvino

I'm tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading. ~ C.S. Lewis

The Lord knows our bearing capacity, both as to coping and to comprehending, and He will not give us more to bear than we can manage at the moment, though to us it may seem otherwise. Just as no temptations will come to us from which we cannot escape or which we cannot bear, we will not be given more trials than we can sustain. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

Horst lurked in a corner, sitting upon a tea chest, and undermining any menace his vampiric presence might have brought to proceedings by reading an ancient copy of Comic Cuts that he had found somewhere. ~ Jonathan L. Howard

Books were something that happened to readers. Readers were the victims of books. ~ Holly Black

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. ~ John Locke

The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing. ~ Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl Of Chesterfield

Say, did you read what this writer just dug up in George Washington's diary? I was so ashamed I sat up all night reading it. ~ Will Rogers

I was brought up in the countryside in Ireland and would go bonkers if I couldn't escape the city. I like to wake and hear birds tweeting, not the low drone of traffic. ~ Mariella Frostrup

If you want to know what we are, look at the men reading books, searching in the dark pages of history for the lost word, the key to the mystery of the living peace. We are factory hands, field hands, mill hands, searching, building and molding structures. We are doctors, scientists, chemists discovering and eliminating disease, hunger and antagonism. We are soldiers, Navy men, citizens, guarding the imperishable dreams of our fathers to live in freedom. We are the living dream of dead men. We are the living spirit of free men. ~ Carlos Bulosan

Poetry is a will to put things right, an imaginary solution, a way of avoiding a catastrophe that already happened. Poetry is an escape, perhaps intelligent, perhaps idiotic, from a senile situation. It is a dialectical movement, it keeps tearing open the wounds while trying to heal them. Here we see the only acceptable path open up towards an existence worthy of human beings. Here the seriousness is unfaltering and absolute. Where it will lead no one knows. ~ Aase Berg

The last great escape. I was done gambling, done betting on a ship that would never come in. I would cash in my chips while I was ahead. I didn't want to suffer the growing old, didn't want to wait until my memory went. It was all so tiresome. I would just go out in a blaze of glory before the parasites of sadness got at me and made me bitter. After that's the American way: take your own life before everything else takes it from you. ~ Brian James

this morning, listening to the BBC news, I learned that half of all prisoners in the UK have the reading age of an eleven-year-old, or below. This ~ Neil Gaiman

He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself. But the street ran on: catlike, one place was the same as another to him. But in none of them could he be quiet. But the street ran on in its moods and phases, always empty: he might have seen himself as in numberless avatars, in silence, doomed with motion, driven by the courage of flagged and spurred despair; by the despair of courage whose opportunities had to be flagged and spurred. ~ William Faulkner

The question 'Why poetry?' isn't asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: "What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that's unutterable?" You can't generalize very usefully about poetry; you can't reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can't successfully answer the question of "Why poetry?," can't reduce it in the way I think you can't, then maybe that's the strongest evidence that poetry's doing its job; it's creating an essential need and then satisfying it. ~ Richard Ford

I enjoyed the discipline and solitariness of long-distance running, which allowed me to escape from the hurly-burly of school life. ~ Nelson Mandela

I get a glimpse of the mind of many souls from their sacred books. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

At the time that I was struggling with these questions, I was reading and teaching from Is There a Meaning in this Text? ~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Sometimes I think that the long-term work of reading is to discover one by one, the books that hold the scattered elements of our nature, after which the true consummation can begin. We undertake the gradual focused exploration, nuance by nuance, of their meanings, their implications; we follow out the strands that mysteriously connect the words of another with the unformulated stuff of the self. ~ Sven Birkerts