“Yes, life is hard,” whispers Erika, “but knowing about other people, other civilisations, other ways of living, other places – that’s your escape route, a magical journey. Once you know about these things, no matter what happens, your mind can create stories to take you anywhere you want to go.”— Eliza Granville
“I love stories that suck you in, that you can’t stop reading because you are quite simply there.”— Sara Sheridan
“The beam of light flashed across her own face and she thought, Yes, me, Khady Demba, still happy to utter her name silently and to sense its apt harmony with the precise, satisfying image she had of her own features and of the Khady heart that dwelled within her to which no one but she had access.”— Marie NDiaye
“Rural and traditional escapism. That’s my angle. Places and events where we are free to relax and be ourselves, where nobody tells us to hurry along or conform or grow up. Somewhere we can properly live.”— Fennel Hudson
“Let those who smile at me, ask themselves whether they have been indebted most to imagination or reality for all they have enjoyed in life, if indeed they have ever enjoyed any thing.”— Charles Robert Maturin
“To hide away from the world whose loveless heart has gone astrayand its inhabitants what could be a safer place than my imagination?”— Anna Jae
“i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.”— Khaled Hosseini
“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
“While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest.”— H.P. Lovecraft
“Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors–we hope–of your life come from reading fiction.”— Orson Scott Card
“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
“People talk about escapism as if it’s a bad thing… Once you’ve escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn’t have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.”— Neil Gaiman
“Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of “escape.” I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, “What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?” and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”— C.S. Lewis
“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
“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
“[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
“Whenever I come across someone speaking negatively about escapism or looking down on those who seek a temporary escape from this world, I can’t help but look at them as absolute fools. To deny someone the right to find temporary peace in escapism is to deny human nature itself as well as all the benefits of such a beautiful concept. Often times, these instances show them saying that “it’ll only make things worse” or “it’s not gonna change anything”, except, a lot of times, that’s not the case at all. How many times has someone shut themselves away from the world by listening to a song they hold dear only to return more ready to face the world than before, how many times has someone learned something about themselves through the fictional events of a novel that they wouldn’t have other wise, how many times has society experienced great change through people who dreamed of making the world a better place, only to eventually make those dreams into a reality.”— Justin Allen
“How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time…”— Neil Gaiman
“A wave of saudade swept over me as I realized home never existed at all. The concept of home felt far from my reach, and I felt sick with longing.”— M.B. Dallocchio
“If fiction and fantasy books are escapism, then let an author write them so as to better equip the reader to face reality by the end.”— Brett Armstrong
“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
“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.