#cape

He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands. ↗

— Alexander McCall Smith

#german #irish #landscape #language #imagination

Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from — hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#escape #escapism #human-nature #theatre #art

College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did not—intellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere between all that fear and dread, I'd realized that was the wrong reason to go to college. That the potential for those things had been inside of me all along, only I'd never realized because I hadn't believed myself strong enough to break free without an intermediary. ↗

— Nenia Campbell

#feminism #freedom #inspirational #philosophy #freedom

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

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

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

There’s no magical healing in this. I won’t wake up tomorrow fixed and joyful. I’ll still hurt and grieve. But moments like this, with Colton? They make it all bearable. He doesn't fix me, doesn't heal me. He just makes life worthwhile. He helps me remember to breathe, shows me how to smile again. He kisses me, and I can forget pain, forget the urges I still have to cut for the pain that erases the emotions. ↗

— Jasinda Wilder

#colton #cutter #cutting #escape #falling