Sunday, April 18, 2021 – No Escape Now
Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We, of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. ~ Abraham Lincoln
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. ~ Frederick Weisel
Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really dropped 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 – everybody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case. ~ Michael Connelly, The Brass Verdict
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
It is the hour to be drunken! To escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. ~ Charles Baudelaire
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort. ~ Jean Cocteau
No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from. ~ George Eliot
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of it. ~ Roland Barthes
All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality – the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape. ~ Walter Bagehot
Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith. ~ Christopher Fry
There is no escape – we pay for the violence of our ancestors. ~ Frank Herbert
If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible. ~ Ram Dass
The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape. ~ Alice James
Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient. ~ Henry Ward Beecher
It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness. ~ George Borrow
Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw. ~ David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
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, Ways of Escape
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 emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. ~ T. S. Eliot
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. ~ Virginia Woolf, The Waves
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, East of Eden
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, Studies in Classic American Literature
So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go. ~ Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
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, Exile’s Return
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. ~ Anaïs Nin
Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting. ~ Eric Hoffer
The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape. ~ Samuel Johnson
With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves. ~ Eric Hoffer
I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness. ~ Allen Ginsberg
A man has only one escape from his old self: to see a different self in the mirror of some woman’s eyes. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
The first time that you escape from home or the small town that you live in… there’s a reason a small town is called a small town: It’s because not many people want to live there. ~ Billie Joe Armstrong
Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape. ~ William Hazlitt
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. ~ Thomas Mann
A child can escape the shadows. ~ Steve Largent
Just Above Sunset 