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Escapism Quotes

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Escapism Quotes

“It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.”

“Attachment and aversion are two short term strategies. There is a third. Some people reach for the bottle. It may be a bottle of alcohol or a bottle of pills, but the effect is much the same. Quite a large proportion of the population find it difficult to bear even one day without the effect of alcohol. Much of the agricultural land in the world is devoted exclusively to the production of alcohol — and this while others starve. Yet alcohol does much physical damage to our bodies and leads to socially destructive behaviour. Of course, oblivion is not sought solely through drinking. Many other drugs are used many of them nowadays prescribed by doctors. Oblivion is an accepted 'solution' for many people. The ultimate oblivion-seeking behaviour is suicide. Where hateful behaviour can do massive damage in a short time and greedy behaviour has a slow undermining effect upon our lives, behaviour based on the desire for oblivion does both. We suffer in the short run and we suffer in the long run. This is the most extreme form of escapism. The attempt to destroy suffering in this way, however, destroys us.”

“Reading is important. It’s not primarily escapism (though it can be, and there’s nothing wrong with some of that in good measure) and it’s not primarily a way of passing the time. Reading is important to the good life because it stokes the furnaces of our intellect, allows us to expand our understanding of the universe, both inner and outer, for practical gain and simple pleasure. It can induce awe, inspire respect, excite, piss off, and intrigue. These are things that make life worth living.”

“Of all the inventions Addie has seen her ushered into the world — steam-powered trains, electric lights, photography, and phones, and airplanes, and computers — movies might just be her favorite one. Books are wonderful, portable, lasting, but sitting there, in the darkened theater, the wide screen filling her vision, the world falls away, and for a few short hours she is someone else, plunged into romance and intrigue and comedy and adventure.”

“One must remember that though in one sense the Other World was a definite place, yet in another the kingdom of gods was within one, Earth and fairy-land co-exist upon the same foot of ground. It was all a matter of the seeing eye...the dweller in this world can become aware of an existence on a totally different plane. To go from earth to faery is like passing from this time to eternity; it is not a journey in space, but a change of mental outlook.”

“We must choose our personal viewpoint. We can embrace a sense of weighty heaviness that comes from knowing that our fate is one of deterioration and death, and our suffering is interminable. Alternatively, we can choose to believe in the unbearable lightness of our being and embrace a world of high-minded thoughts and ideals. The decisions we make are significant regardless if we only have one life to live. We weave our life story out of the choices that we make when confronted with the inevitable opportunities to experience love and friendship and heartache and suffering. During our life, we encounter goodness and evilness, and hope and despair. We must decide whether we accept reality. Alternatively, do we seek to escape the pain that comes from acknowledging the paucity of human existence?”

“Когда люди живут в таких обстоятельствах, когда происходят ужасные вещи на их глазах, многие закрывают глаза и не хотят ничего знать, видеть. Потому что знать, видеть и понимать — это очень опасно. Многие рассуждали так: если я буду это знать, об этом думать, я начну об этом говорить. Тогда со мной самим что-то случится, я никому ничем не помогу, поэтому я не буду знать и не буду думать, пока меня это не коснулось. И сейчас так тоже многие думают.”

“Every unpleasant worldly experience in life exposes our sensitive nervous systems to painful phenomena. Despite all the beer commercial advertisement slogans urging us to live with gusto, life is unavoidably painful. Life is a battering ram that inflicts trauma upon human beings. People blunt the traumatic force of enduring a lifetime of pain, fearfulness, and unremitted anguish and boredom with religion, sex, booze, drugs, fantasy, and other indulgent acts and forms acts of escapism.”

“Existential anguish derives from the human freedom to think and act, experience love for life, and fear death. We must decide whether we wish to embrace all experience and encounters in life or seek escape from various aspect of human nature. How we resolve to address existential anguish becomes a large part of our personal story.”

“If you ask me, our planet and our entire lives are a [virtual] construct of our own minds and the mind at large. If we were to decode the COVID-19 message coming from the transcendent realm, I would approximate it as: ‘The next phase of human evolution is clearly in the cards now: Consuming synthetic meat and being open to the connectivity explosion with immersive virtual worlds not for escapism but for expansion of the human creative imagination should become a conscientious choice for billions. The ‘Cradle Age’ is almost over.”

“But since these rolls of bread and wine bottles are needed by me, and your faces with their hollows and prominences are beautiful, and the table-cloth and its yellow stain, far from being allowed to spread in wider and wider circles of understanding that may at last (so I dream, falling off the edge of the earth at night when my bed floats suspended) embrace the entire world, I must go through the antics of the individual. I must start when you pluck at me with your children, your poems, your chilblains or whatever it is that you do and suffer. But I am not deluded. After all these callings hither and thither, these pluckings and searchings, I shall fall alone through this thin sheet into gulfs of fire. And you will not help me. More cruel than the old torturers, you will let me fall, and will tear me to pieces when I am fallen. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”

“This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past. When given free rein, his imagination played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings and trifling things. His nostalgic memory glorified them and they assumed a strange character. Their world and their existence seemed very distant and the spirit reached out for them longingly: In my mind I took bus rides, unlocked the front door of my apartment, answered my telephone, switched on the electric lights. Our thoughts often centered on such details, and these memories could move one to tears.”

“Emotional chaos supplied by detachment, remoteness, and aloneness creates its own pathos of loneliness, quiet desperation, and despair. A person who lives in seclusion experiences a stronger yearning to blunt their solitude by establishing a false sense of connection via the artifice of plugging into television, engaging in Internet surfacing, and participating in other entertaining diversionary activities that fill the void of mental stillness. Americans multitasking on electronic devices is escapism at megabyte speed.”

“Last Star Standing (Feb. 18, 2021) It's set in the near future - 2094 - and follows an alien invasion - so it HAS to be marketed as science fiction - but it's really about the narrator's tough, terrifying, but ultimately life-affirming personal journey. The book hit me, about three years ago, when I was meditating. This is something I do very badly! - but I have had amazing experiences - swirling colours, images - and, in this case, a character. I found myself looking down, from the Earth's surface, about a hundred metres, down a metallic shaft, at a young man imprisoned in a metal chair. It was Aiden, my narrator, and - from that bizarre introduction - he wouldn't leave me alone. With sinking heart I realised that I was being asked to write - at least technically - science fiction, of which I'd read exactly three - 1984, Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and The Handmaid's Tale. The idea was crazy and I fought it tooth and nail. But Aiden fought back. He wanted his book to happen. He wanted to BE. And - long story short - he won! It's jst been published. If you read it, I hope you enjoy it. If you enjoy it, I hope you review it. And I very, VERY much hope, in these tough times, it really does offer a little escape! Spaulding Taylor”

“Comfort and security are all well and good, but not at the cost of liberty, love and lustiness. The Bohemian knows that money, property and status have little to do with the content of one’s character, and that professional success and widespread celebration have little to do with talent. Of value to the Bohemian is spiritual integrity and creative freedom. The Bohemian would sooner live in poverty than submit to an undesirable job.”

“The average American watches more than four hours of TV each day. In a 65-year life, that person will have spent nine years glued to the tube. Why? Simple. Life sucks. Life needs an escape. Life is no good. Show me someone who spends hours online playing Mafia Wars or Farmville, and I'll show you someone who probably isn't very successful. When life sucks, escapes are sought. I don't need television because I invested my time into a real life worth living, not a fictitious escape that airs every Tuesday night at 8 p.m. Again, majority thinking yields mediocrity, and for that majority, time is an asset that is undervalued and mindlessly squandered.”

“I fucking romanticize the idea of disappearing forever. I don’t mean checking out early, pulling a Hemingway with the shotgun, leaving a mess for the maid and a legacy for the critics to pick over like vultures on a roadside carcass. That’s too final. That’s too loud. I’m talking about the fade out. The slow dissolve. I’m talking about the Great Vanishing Act.”