#cape

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

#escape #frederick-weisel #teller #weisel #life

Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again. ↗

— Maud Hart Lovelace

#escape #imagination #libraries #library #reading

When I am alone with God I see that God is really all I have. All that matters. All that will last. At these times I realize that the magnitude of what I have is incomprehensible. Usually I cry for the sheer joy of it. Not tears of defeat, but rather tears of gratitude. ↗

— Pola Muzyka

#romance-novels #thriller #thriller

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know. ↗

— Wallace Stevens

#imagination #landscape #nature #imagination

Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn't get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of her apartment, walk forever if she liked, but she couldn't escape what really hurt. Tonight even the sky felt like a prison. ↗

— Ann Brashares

#escape #hurt #leave #love #memories

He awaits himself while walking, out of the icy circle to escape. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#circling #dejan-stojanovic #escape #icy #literature

Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women. It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#escape #eve #humor #paradise #sarcasm

Murphy's law inverted: What can go right, will go right. (Works if you're an optimist.) ↗

— Saloma Miller Furlong

#coming-of-age #escape-from-the-amish #inspirational #memoir #age

melancholy grandeur ↗

— John Constaable

#art

For years, walking round London, I had been aware of the actual land, lying concealed but not entirely changed or destroyed, beneath the surface of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century city. It has been said that 'God made the country and man made the town', but that is not true: the town is simply disguised countryside. Main roads, some older than history itself, still bend to avoid long-dried marshes, or veer off at an angle where the wall of a manor house once stood. Hills and valleys still remain; rivers, even though entombed in sewer pipes, still cause trouble in the foundations of neighbouring buildings and become a local focus for winter mists. Garden walls follow the line of hedgerows; the very street-patterns have been determined by the holdings of individual farmers and landlords, parcels of land some of which can be traced back to the Norman Conquest. The situation of specific buildings - pubs, churches, institutions - often dates from long distant decisions and actions on the part of men whose names have vanished from any record. ↗

— Gillian Tindall

#landscape #local-history #london #dating