#cap

For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for an escape when I was right here beside him? ↗

— Kamila Shamsie

#escape #jealousy #jealousy

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#gardening #landscape #nature #poetry #education

Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading. ↗

— Ruth Rendell

#escapism #life #reading #life

All that is left to bring you pain, are the memories. If you face those, you’ll be free. You can’t spend the rest of your life hiding from yourself; always afraid that your memories will incapacitate you, and they will if you continue to bury them. ↗

— J.D. Stroube

#bury #free #hide #incapacitate #memories

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

#escape #literature #reading #words #life

Maybe if I'd agreed to do the debutante thing like she wanted. Or taken up pageants instead of riding jump bikes with a bunch of grungy boys. I'd always tell her, why can't I do both? Who says you have to be either smart or pretty, or into girly stuff or sports? Life shouldn't be about the either/or. We're capable of more than that, you know? ↗

— Sarah Dessen

#auden-west #bikes #boys #capable-of-more #debutante

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

#renewal #self #void #life

Before I knew escape, life was something to be endured, passively. Now I hunger for it. ↗

— Kristin Halbrook

#life #life

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

#life

. . . then life began, and since then we remember each dumpster, abandoned house, and foot-chase by retail security. At night, after running around, plotting and scheming, our checklist items all crossed out, we paused to think — 'What to do tomorrow?' and the answer was always, 'As we please . . . ↗

— CrimethInc.

#life #society #life