Oct. 15, 2024, 6:45 p.m.
Escape rooms have captivated adventurous minds around the globe, offering a unique blend of mystery, teamwork, and adrenaline. Whether you're a seasoned escape room enthusiast or a curious first-timer, there's a sense of exhilaration when you're racing against the clock to crack codes and unlock secrets. In this spirit of thrill and camaraderie, we've compiled a collection of 49 inspirational and entertaining quotes that capture the essence of the escape room challenge. Prepare to be motivated, amused, and perhaps even enlightened as you step into the world where puzzles become adventures.
1. “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” - W. Somerset Maugham
2. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” - Shirley Jackson
3. “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.” - Flannery O'Connor
4. “Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.” - Philip K. Dick
5. “But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.” - Junot Diaz
6. “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.” - Graham Greene
7. “It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.” - Margaret Atwood
8. “Use them with care, and use them with respect as to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary research tool. Go banging about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get into a really bad place, psychologically. Know what you're using, decide just why you're using it, and you can have a rich experience. They're not addictive, and they're certainly not escapist, either, but they're exceptionally valuable tools for understanding the human mind, and how it works.” - Alexander Shulgin
9. “Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.” - David Mitchell
10. “I choose to write because it's perfect for me. It's an escape, a place I can go to hide. It's a friend, when I feel out casted from everyone else. It's a journal, when the only story I can tell is my own. It's a book, when I need to be somewhere else. It's control, when I feel so out of control. It's healing, when everything seems pretty messed up.And it's fun, when life is just flat-out boring.” - Alysha Speer
11. “You are aware of only one unrest;Oh, never learn to know the other!Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,And one is striving to forsake its brother.Unto the world in grossly loving zest,With clinging tendrils, one adheres;The other rises forcibly in questOf rarefied ancestral spheres.If there be spirits in the airThat hold their sway between the earth and sky,Descend out of the golden vapors thereAnd sweep me into iridescent life.Oh, came a magic cloak into my handsTo carry me to distant lands,I should not trade it for the choicest gown,Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
12. “How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure.” - Alexandre Dumas
13. “The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.” - John Steinbeck
14. “When introverts go to church, we crave sanctuary in every sense of the word, as we flee from the disorienting distractions of twenty-first-century life. We desire to escape from superficial relationships, trivial communications and the constant noise that pervade our world, and find rest in the probing depths of God's love.” - Adam S. McHugh
15. “Escape? There is one unwatched way: your eyes. O Beauty! Keep me good that secret gate.” - Wilfred Owen
16. “For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for an escape when I was right here beside him?” - Kamila Shamsie
17. “Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.” - D.H. Lawrence
18. “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
19. “Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don't realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even then any movie.” - Eckhart Tolle
20. “He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design.""You say this as if you envied him.""There are worse prisons than words.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
21. “By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I was a child. The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape.” - Thomas Wolfe
22. “This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.” - Michael Ondaatje
23. “The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.” - Jared Diamond
24. “I spent the rest of the day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs.” - Amy Plum
25. “You’ve gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you’re studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back.” - Jennifer Echols
26. “She walked forward, feeling the dew on the grass with each step. She tightened her eyes, welcoming the darkness.” - Eveli Acosta
27. “An Overall Feeling of Doom that One Cannot Ever Escape no Matter What One Does” - Lemony Snicket
28. “Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores. — Teller: A Novel” - Frederick Weisel
29. “The problem with escaping is that we leave behind us, even among those we love, different versions of the truth and everything we couldn’t bring ourselves to say.” - Frederick Weisel
30. “I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.” - Jeanette Winterson
31. “The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.” - Malcolm Cowley
32. “Before I knew escape, life was something to be endured, passively. Now I hunger for it.” - Kristin Halbrook
33. “For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.” - Elizabeth von Arnim
34. “She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child.You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you.” - Jean Rhys
35. “Sometimes I wish I was in the movies...Not to be famous or nothing. I just wish I was made of light. Then nobody’d know me except for what they saw up on that screen. I’d just be light up on the silver screen, and not at all a man.” - Alan Heathcock
36. “However cozy things seemed, the facts of life were the same. You couldn't escape death: It would get us all in the end.” - Rachel Ward
37. “Twentyone is too old to go anywhere alone, you know that. I want to go with someone. I don't mean as a bride, I'm not so gauche as that, but as a mistress or paramour or concubine or companion or friend or pal or anything else. I just don't want to be left alone! I want to get out of here!" She said it again for all the wide-faced flowers to hear: "I want to get out of here!” - Douglas Woolf
38. “The tears in my pus-filled eyes became a thousand little crystals of ever color. Like stained-glass windows, I thought. God is with you today, Papi! In the midst of nature's monstrous elements, in the wind, the immenseness of the sea, the depth of the waves, the imposing green roof of the bush, you feel your own infinitesimal smallness, and perhaps it's here, without looking for Him, that you find God, that you touch Him with your finger. I had sensed Him at night during the thousands of hours I had spent buried alive in dank dungeons without a ray of sun; I touched Him today in a sun that would devour everything too weak to resist it. I touched God, I felt Him around me, inside me. He even whispered in my ear: "You will suffer; you will suffer more. But this time I am on your side. You will be free. You will, I promise you.” - Henri Charrière
39. “In the past I had often tried to escape the grown-up world of sorrow through my imagination- dreaming that a handsome young lieutenant would ride to my rescue or that a great empresario would discover my musical talents and whisk me away. I had envisioned knights in shining armor and happily ever after scenes to escape from rules or boredom or pain; including a vision of my mother walking through our front door whole and well again. Now I knew that a lifetime of escape led to a life like Aunt Bertie's. My imagination was a gift, but I had to live in the real world. My eyes had been opened this summer to poverty and crime and abuse and I needed to use my imagination not to escape, but to help people like Irina and Katya, to make my own contribution as the women in the women's pavilion had done. I couldn't do it in the same way Jane Adams and my grandmother and Aunt Mat were, but I would find my own way and my own time.” - Lynn Austin
40. “Running my fastest not from my past. Running from those who have hurt me in it. And, they can't catch me anymore. I escaped from the land of make believe.” - Jill Telford
41. “We are the wilderness withinScreaming out for true expression.Even when we’re sleeping,There’s no escape from this obsession.” - jay woodman
42. “Even in the darkness of the closed box she felt trapped inside, she could see light shining in through tiny holes on the lid.They were like the stars beckoning her towards a place where all would be simple . . . away from the shadows, away from the darkness.” - Umair Naeem
43. “But it was fantasy, and she knew it. It was her fantasy, and the fantasy of everyone else who would look at her and at her pictures; and it would stop being real the moment the man with the camera stopped clicking.” - Umair Naeem
44. “Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.” - Anais Nin
45. “When you see a man led to prison say in your heart, "Mayhap he is escaping from a narrower prison." And when you see a man drunken say in your heart, "Mayhap he sought escape from something still more unbeautiful.” - Kahlil Gibran
46. “I now know how your angercame from skeletonsthat rattled in your heartand you couldn't escape them.” - Susie Clevenger
47. “Reading always calmed me down: filling my head with other - made up - people's problems and conflicts made my own seem less terrible, less real.” - Heather James
48. “She once told me of a night that fumed with escapes and was filled with bedsides reeking of ecstasy; she told me the stars cast not judgments, but blessings, knowing full well the disastrous outcomes of the deeds they cradled with the strings of their young hearts. She’d inhaled the night itself, those around her doing the same, and so all become one. No disharmony. No discordance. Nothing to shatter the cause; nothing to unearth the beauty. So as we together ascended that front porch, allowing the glow behind the blown-out windows and the odious steams plunder us from through the cracks...time forgot to distill us, and our steps became as silver as glass. I could no longer deny the boiling words of my blood: tonight would be the beginning of a very long road indeed.” - Dave Matthes
49. “There's nowhere else to escape to ... Except in a wooden box, that is.” - H.M. Forester