Fyodor Dostoevsky
Novelist, Philosopher
"The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison."
Escaping quotes
Escaping
196 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Umberto Eco
Writer, Philosopher, Literary Critic
"We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die."
Thomas Wolfe
Novelist
"Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you."
Russell Baker
Writer
"Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of."
Muhammad al-Baqir
Islamic Scholar
"In his love for the world, the greedy is like the silkworm: the more it wraps in its cocoon, the less it has of escaping from it, until it dies of grief."
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Escaping quotes (page 1 of 10)
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"The breath of peace was fanning her glorious brow, her head was bowed a very little forward, and a tress, escaping from its bonds, fell by the side of her pure white temple, and close to her just opened lips; it hung there motionless! no breath disturbed its repose! She slept as an angel might sleep, having accomplished the mission of her God."
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"Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them."
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"escapism isn't good or bad in itself. what is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to."
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"There was no one color that could paint Lena Duchannes. She was a red sweater and a blue sky, a gray wind and a silver sparrow, a black curl escaping from behind her ear."
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"Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it."
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"Nobody actually ever does this—escaping through a window."
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"And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept."
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"Frank Zappa was one of the gods of the Czech underground, I thought of him as a friend. Whenever I feel like escaping from the world of the Presidency, I think of him."
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"Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy--a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer."
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"There is a tonic strength, in the hour of sorrow and affliction, in escaping from the world and society and getting back to the simple duties and interests we have slighted and forgotten. Our world grows smaller, but it grows dearer and greater. Simple things have a new charm for us, and we suddenly realize that we have been renouncing all that is greatest and best, in our pursuit of some phantom."
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"Soul's escaping through this hole that is gaping"
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"I think escapism is very important, certainly in my life. I love nothing more than escaping into the world of a film or a novel. To be involved in creating that for other people is a privilege."
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"Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice."
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"My concept of successful living is escaping the matrix."
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"Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past Into different lives, or into any future; You are not the same people who left that station Or who will arrive at any terminus, While the narrowing rails slide together behind you."
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"Elvis' early music has drama because as he sang he was escaping limits."
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""Getting away from it all," many people want that, and of course ultimately the only way to get away from it all is to go within, now."
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"Fantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human."
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"We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate."
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"She placed her palm over his wound, pressing as hard as she dared. She would stop the blood. She would hold him and stop his life from escaping. She would hold life inside him and he wouldn’t die"
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