36 Inspiring Escapism Quotes

In our fast-paced world, the concept of escapism offers a much-needed sanctuary, a momentary reprieve from reality's demands. Whether through literature, art, or simple daydreaming, seeking an escape can inspire new perspectives and revive the spirit. Imagine a journey through words, where each quote serves as a stepping stone leading away from the mundane and towards boundless imagination and reflection. In this collection, we present 36 inspiring escapism quotes that promise to whisk you away, stir your creativity, and ignite the desire for exploration within your soul. Let's embark on this journey together, and discover the power of words to transport us beyond the ordinary.

1. “Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” - Ruth Rendell

2. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” - Shirley Jackson

3. “Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.” - Alberto Manguel

4. “Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?” - Laura Miller

5. “Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.” - Orson Scott Card

6. “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

7. “I’ve tried that. I’ve tried aspirin, too. Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle. What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.” - Truman Capote

8. “Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.” - J. Maarten Troost

9. “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

10. “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

11. “We left behind the other kids; their path-working, drinking, and being grown up- and rejected all that made them grumpy, uncreative and lifeless. We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place when we decided our lives were meant to be lived. Life serves the risk taker...” - CrimethInc.

12. “These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.” - Virginia Woolf

13. “I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. [...] It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that makes the days into one day, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until it is meaningless.” - Audrey Niffenegger

14. “We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.(pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America")” - Wendell Berry

15. “[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.(pg. 44, "The Unsettling of America")” - Wendell Berry

16. “Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.” - Haruki Murakami

17. “It may be escapist, but if I have a choice between watching the news or reading a book which gets me to see the world through different eyes, I will always choose the latter!” - Christina Westover

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

19. “There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on--a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.” - Graham Swift

20. “Once I learned, I went online and ordered every romance novel I could find. They're fairy tales for grown-ups.” - Gena Showalter

21. “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

22. “Tant que mes jambes me permettent de fuir, tant que mes bras me permettent de combattre, tant que l'expérience que j'ai du monde me permet de savoir ce que je peux craindre ou désirer, nulle crainte : je puis agir. Mais lorsque le monde des hommes me contraint à observer ses lois, lorsque mon désir brise son front contre le monde des interdits, lorsque mes mains et mes jambes se trouvent emprisonnées dans les fers implacables des préjugés et des cultures, alors je frissonne, je gémis et je pleure. Espace, je t'ai perdu et je rentre en moi-même. Je m'enferme au faite de mon clocher où, la tête dans les nuages, je fabrique l'art, la science et la folie.” - Henri Laborit

23. “Träume und Märchen waren ihr eigentlicher Lebensinhalt, dachte ich jetzt. Deshalb hat sie sich auch umgebracht, dachte ich, weil ein Mensch, der nur Träume und Märchen sich zu seinem Lebensinhalt gemacht hat, in dieser Welt nicht überleben kann, nicht überleben darf, dachte ich.” - Thomas Bernhard

24. “There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.” - Arthur C. Clarke

25. “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

26. “Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very young age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. (...) But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinently shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child who was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her.” - Alice Miller

27. “I want to glide in a world of beauty,’ I said. ‘To be carried away into a world of luxurious things.” - James Lusarde

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Everyone needs to escape sometimes, and retreating into somebody else's fantasy isn't nearly as satisfying as slipping into your own.” - Nenia Campbell

32. “We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.” - William Styron

33. “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

34. “...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

35. “People love escapism and there should be a place for it.” - Tom Hiddleston

36. “I steel myself to ignore his taunts and his coarse language. I no longer care what he says or does. It doesn't matter anymore. I am detached, contained in my own private world where he cannot reach me. It is my last refuge.” - Alison Weir