64 Escape Quotes To Inspire

In a world filled with responsibilities, expectations, and challenges, the yearning to escape and find solace never subsides. Whether it's a mental break, a physical getaway, or an emotional retreat, the idea of escaping has a unique way of inspiring us to seek freedom and rejuvenation. Dive into our carefully curated collection of top 64 escape quotes, each crafted to spark a sense of adventure, relief, and inspiration. These quotes are more than just words; they're a call to embark on a journey, explore new horizons, and rediscover the essence of peace and tranquility within ourselves.

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. “Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. ” - William S. Burroughs

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?” - Roman Payne

11. “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

12. “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

13. “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.” - T.S. Eliot

14. “Escape is a commodity like anything else” - Iain M. Banks

15. “I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.” - Rabih Alameddine

16. “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.” - Sigmund Freud

17. “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

18. “There is no such thing as escape after all, only an exchange of one set of difficulties for another. It wasn't Mark or the farm or marriage I was trying to shake loose from but my own imperfect self, and even if I kept moving, she would dog me all the way around the world, forever.” - Kristin Kimball

19. “As he had once said to someone in England, though he did not care to remember whom, he had liked the sight of the sea because it represented his escape from England. And he had escaped.But she had said that perhaps it was from himself he wished to escape and that it could not be done. For wherever he went, he must inevitably take himself along too.” - Mary Balogh

20. “Escape? There is one unwatched way: your eyes. O Beauty! Keep me good that secret gate.” - Wilfred Owen

21. “Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then. And perhaps it is more wonderful still when our landing at the waking-point is abrupt and the thoughts of our sleep, hidden by a cloak of oblivion, have no time to return to us gradually, before sleep ceases. Then, from the black storm through which we seem to have passed (but we do not even say we), we emerge prostrate, without a thought, a we that is void of content.” - Marcel Proust

22. “She put her tongue out and felt the raw edges of the torn silk. She looped her tongue around them and drew them into her teeth. Just a little bit, she thought, that's all I need to free my eyelids. She pulled the tasteless web between her teeth and ground, pulling her jaw down in a grimace - it felt as it she was eating the very skin off her face. But the silk over her eyelids shifted.” - Stephen M. Irwin

23. “To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.” - John Fowles

24. “[Prison Break is] one of the craziest, most unpredictable roller-coaster rides on TV today.” - Stephen King

25. “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

26. “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

27. “...to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. “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

29. “They're gone. I let them chase me. I led them like a sunbeam and vanished like a shadow.” - Erin Bow

30. “Growing up in my family meant ambushes on your birthday, crossbows for Christmas, and games of dodge ball where the balls were occasionally rigged to explode. It also meant learning how to work your way out of a wide variety of death traps. Failure to get loose on your own could lead to missing dinner, or worse, being forced to admit that you missed dinner because your baby sister had tied you to the couch. Again.” - Seanan McGuire

31. “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

32. “I must apologize for calling so late," said he, "and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

33. “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

34. “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

35. “During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.” - Tahir Shah

36. “Bosch had never liked Las Vegas, though he came often on cases. It shared a kinship with Los Angeles; both were places desperate people ran to. Often, when they ran from Los Angeles, they came here. It was the only place left.” - Michael Connelly

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “There is an abandonment, an escape, that physical labor bestows.” - Steven Gould

42. “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

43. “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

44. “You're trying to escape from your difficulties, and there never is any escape from difficulties, never. They have to be faced and fought.” - Enid Blyton

45. “I walked in the dark forest at night...I couldn't see much further in the dark ,I heard the sound of the past, ..Memories Went back clear to me and Fear started hunting me, ..No Way To Escape , No Way To Stand Still...” - Hamza wolf

46. “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

47. “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

48. “College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did not—intellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere between all that fear and dread, I'd realized that was the wrong reason to go to college. That the potential for those things had been inside of me all along, only I'd never realized because I hadn't believed myself strong enough to break free without an intermediary.” - Nenia Campbell

49. “Then sudden Felagund there swayingSang in answer a song of staying,Resisting, battling against power,Of secrets kept, strength like a tower,And trust unbroken, freedom, escape;Of changing and of shifting shape,Of snares eluded, broken traps,The prison opening, the chain that snaps.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

50. “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

51. “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

52. “Delusions are hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding insane people living in a backwards world.” - Shannon L. Alder

53. “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

54. “That's the funny thing about trying to escape. You never really can. Maybe temporarily, but not completely.” - Jennifer L. Armentrout

55. “A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape.” - Dejan Stojanovic

56. “He awaits himself while walking, out of the icy circle to escape.” - Dejan Stojanovic

57. “Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough--I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too.” - Nicole Christie

58. “I had to sever my emotional cord to escape the anger and shame that silently slithered through my head, disconnecting myself from the stares and whispers that followed me down the hall.” - Rebecca Donovan

59. “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

60. “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

61. “I now know how your angercame from skeletonsthat rattled in your heartand you couldn't escape them.” - Susie Clevenger

62. “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

63. “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

64. “There's nowhere else to escape to ... Except in a wooden box, that is.” - H.M. Forester