Escape Quotes

“Why escape your intended purpose by copying and trying to be someone else? You will discover who you were meant to be only after you have shown confidence being yourself.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“...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, The Brothers Karamazov

“They're gone. I let them chase me. I led them like a sunbeam and vanished like a shadow.”
― Erin Bow, Plain Kate

“I've never been somewhere I belonged, but there are places where I think I could be happy. Like San Francisco. Well, do art museums count? Because I feel like I belong in them.”
― Heather Demetrios, I'll Meet You There

“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, Trunk Music

“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

“There is an abandonment, an escape, that physical labor bestows.”
― Steven Gould, Jumper

“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

“I sat back down and poured a glass of wine. I left my door open. The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios . . . We were all in it together. We were all in one big shit pot together. There was no escape. We were all going to be flushed away.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I spend a tremendous amount of time carefully choosing the roles I wish to play so that I can run from the role I was born to play. And if I keep on doing that, I will eventually set foot in my grave never having set foot on the stage.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“He awaits himself while walking, out of the icy circle to escape.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987

“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, The Dead Path

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

“She clutched the train ticket tighter and waited for the sense of escape to come over her as it had a dozen times before, that heady sensation of having just scooted through the clanging gate, of eluding the thrown net. It didn't come. She was running again, but she wasn't escaping. She'd been chased to ground a long, long time ago.”
― Connie Brockway, The Bridal Season

“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, The Devil's Web

“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, Pure Sunshine

“Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard, apparently willing to get the explanation later, had picked up his oars and was rowing again.
'May I presume to suggest,' yelled Shandy giddily to Davies,
'that we preoceed the hell out of here with all due haste.'
Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower's thwart. 'My dear fellow consider it done.”
― Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides

“Beginning to slow down, my mother walked at a steady pace, cutting through the village and heading down to the sandy shore. The strength in her was admirable as she continued to carry me, even as she struggled to trek through the deep sand.”
― Susan L. Marshall, Adira and the Dark Horse

“I stop in my tracks, turning to face Girl. She is limping across the grass.

I can do this!

Reaching out, I lift her in both my arms. She straddles her legs around my waist and leans her head against my left shoulder.

Girl is heavy but I seem to manage. Finding my inner strength, I support her weight in my arms. My feet continue to pelt across the grass and onto the cement
of the car park.”
― Susan L. Marshall, Adira and the Dark Horse

“Gritting my teeth with determination, I floor the accelerator again, trying to gain as
much distance as I can away from Redfin. Third gear it is! The wind is even stronger now and I feel like my hair is going to fly off my head. A strong whipping sound bursts into my ears as I floor the accelerator one more, engaging fourth gear. Nouveau Road is
wide and long enough to take the truck and its speed for a little while.”
― Susan L. Marshall, Adira and the Dark Horse

“From the trunk of their scheme, choices and decisions sprouted like branches and shoots.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“I loved that kite, that cinnamon hound. We were old friends. I had soared and laughed with that kite. It got me out on the perimeter. I felt I had failed it somehow, and Rune too, even though he would’ve offered the string to Leer, just as I had. Thinking it over I became a bit less angry, and more proud of the kite itself: it had refused to be flown by Leer one moment longer. It broke the line and caught the next gust out of town. A perilous beautiful move, choosing to throw yourself at the future, even if it means one day coming down in the sea.”
― Leif Enger, Virgil Wander

“I ran because if I had not, I would have died. No one told me that you take your world with you, that running becomes a habit.”
― Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“I have avoided the fate my father had planned for me. Surely it is I who has won, not he.”
― Robin LaFevers, Grave Mercy

“Sometimes you escape from the darkness of the shadow and sometimes you take refuge in its mystery! A whole life consists of running away from the same things and then taking shelter in the same things! Escape, then search for what you are escaping from! Always like this! Escape from people, then seek people out; escape from the sun, then look for the sun! Always the same game!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“I know I cannot escape from my heart, but I can escape from your heart. Build the walls of truth, care, and loyalty.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“I chose to trust him when he said that the sharks were like the “dogs of the sea” and took aim, plunging into a shark-less patch of ocean. The water stole all my senses in a second, then a tail called them to attention, whipping my legs as I surfaced among the bubbles, my heart pounding.”
― Dana Da Silva, The Shift: A Memoir

“Departure"
Everyone wants to leave
Those here want to go there,
and many there are eager to return here…
There are those who understood that living is not possible
neither here nor there,
so, you see them, in vain, searching for alternatives…
Few have understood that the impossibility of living
is a result of complicity not geography,
that most of those who stay or depart
never part ways with their complicity and tendency to surrender,
thus, they recreate the circumstances and the causes of departure
everywhere they go…
Few have understood that all places will remain unlivable
so long as the causes to depart are a result
of a complicit and defeated Self…


[Original poem published in Arabic on June 20, 2024 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“Sometimes an escape is also a return.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“You can escape from everyone but not from your thoughts.”
― Ehsan Sehgal