Fantasy Escapism Quotes & Sayings

Our lives are unique stones in the mosaic of human existence
priceless and irreplaceable. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I'd include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you've escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in.
So no, they're not escapist. They're escape. — Neil Gaiman

Perhaps fantasy offers imaginative escapism more than other genres. — Jasper Fforde

The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers ... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape? — Neil Gaiman

I fantasize about making reality better. — Fierce Dolan

He grinned, then winked at her as the waiter finally stepped over. "You wanted - " the waiter began. "Liquor," Wayne said. "Would you care to be a little more specific, sir?" "Lots of liquor. — Brandon Sanderson

Current cant equates fantasy with escapism, and current fashion would have it that fantasy is both easy to read and to write. It isn't. When it is done honestly, by a skillful writer, fantasy takes us far enough beyond our daily perceptions to open us to the essential realities beneath it. This is the true goal of all art. — Ellen Kushner

Every unpleasant worldly experience in life exposes our sensitive nervous systems to painful phenomena. Despite all the beer commercial advertisement slogans urging us to live with gusto, life is unavoidably painful. Life is a battering ram that inflicts trauma upon human beings. People blunt the traumatic force of enduring a lifetime of pain, fearfulness, and unremitted anguish and boredom with religion, sex, booze, drugs, fantasy, and other indulgent acts and forms acts of escapism. — Kilroy J. Oldster

J. R. R. Tolkien, undisputedly a most fluent speaker of this language, was criticized in his day for indulging his juvenile whim of writing fantasy, which was then considered - as it still is in many quarters - an inferior form of literature and disdained as mere "escapism." "Of course it is escapist," he cried. "That is its glory! When a soldier is a prisoner of war it is his duty to escape - and take as many with him as he can." He went on to explain, "The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as possible. — Stephen R. Lawhead

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely? — Laura Miller

Books allow us to escape from the pressures of modern life. By far, the best vehicles of escape are Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy genre allowing us to lose ourselves in worlds far away from the reality we know. This escapism works because we totally immerse ourselves and:-

We become the hero or heroine.
We are the ones who thwart evil.
We laugh as we socialise with characters we have never met but feel they are as close as our family.
We cry when we lose a good friend. — Peter Graham

Everyone needs to escape sometimes, and retreating into somebody else's fantasy isn't nearly as satisfying as slipping into your own. — Nenia Campbell

So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying. — John Shelby Spong

In 1963, before the Beatles burst on the scene, a brief but powerful infatuation with folk music gripped America. The TV show that came along at the right time to capitalize on the craze was Hootenanny, featuring such Caucasian interpreters of the black experience as the Chad Mitchell Trio and the New Christy Minstrels. (Perceived commie Caucasians like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez were not invited to perform.) — Stephen King

While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest. — H.P. Lovecraft

Further, in the modern story, reality is that which is observable, measurable, and repeatable - the kinds of phenomena available, accessible, and verifiable to the five senses. Thus, reality comes to equal the scientific method. It should come as no surprise that in such a world the life of the spirit is ignored or marginalized (as well as a great many other nonmaterial things.) This view of life subsequently birthed in human beings a ravenous materialism as matters of the soul were ignored or reinterpreted within this tightly controlled version of reality. When the life of the spirit is ignored, people will seek to feed the hunger of a neglected soul with the only nourishment available: in our context, the consumptive acquisition of material goods. — Tim Keel

Obviously, circumstances alone do not make us happy or unhappy. It is the way we react to circumstances that determines our feelings. Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is within you. That is where the kingdom of hell is, too. — Dale Carnegie

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on
a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion. — Graham Swift

Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of "escape." I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers. — C.S. Lewis

Steampunk is...a joyous fantasy of the past, allowing us to revel in a nostalgia for what never was. It is a literary playground for adventure, spectacle, drama, escapism and exploration. But most of all it is fun! — George Mann

I'd spent my entire life overdosing on uncut escapism, willingly allowing fantasy to become my reality. — Ernest Cline

How beautiful to dream. But dreams, I tell Gil, in one of our quiet moments are so damned tiring.
He laughs.
I can't promise you that you won't be tired, he says. But please know this. There's a lot of good waiting for you on the other side of tired. Get yourself tired, Andre. That's where you're going to know yourself. On the other side of tired. — Andre Agassi

Imagination doesn't just mean making things up. It means thinking things through, solving them, or hoping to do so, and being just distant enough to be able to laugh at things that are normally painful. Head teachers would call this escapism, but they would be entirely wrong. I would call fantasy the most serious, and the most useful, branch of writing there is. And this is why I don't, and never would, write Real Books. — Diana Wynne Jones

Cowell Devlin sighed. Yes, he understood Anna Wetherell at long last, but it was not a happy understanding. Devlin had known many women of poor prospects and limited means, whose only transport out of the miserable cage of their unhappy circumstance was the flight of the fantastic. Such fantasies were invariably magical - angelic patronage, invitations into paradise - and Anna's story, touching though it was, showed the same strain of the impossible. Why, it was painfully clear! The most eligible bachelor of Anna's acquaintance possessed a love so deep and pure that all respective differences between them were rendered immaterial? He was not dead - he was only missing? He was sending her 'messages' that proved the depth of his love - and these were messages that only she could hear? It was a fantasy, Devlin thought. It was a fantasy of the girl's own devising. The boy could only be dead. — Eleanor Catton

I withdraw my consent from reality. I deny it my assistance. I dedicate myself to the temptations of escapism, and throw myself wholeheartedly into the endlessness of unreality. — Ursula Poznanski

We seek out other people to fight off the loneliness but it's like we're children playing at pretend. We are alone in everything we do, Livy. Alone but not without company. — Shari Arnold

Let those who smile at me, ask themselves whether they have been indebted most to imagination or reality for all they have enjoyed in life, if indeed they have ever enjoyed any thing. — Charles Robert Maturin

around, hiding for hours in dark shadows until the target comes — Noah Child

When you know what's going to be happen, its better to move away than waiting for things to happen. — Nutan Bajracharya

Timid and cowardly soldiers cause the loss of a nation's independence; but pusillanimous magistrates destroy the empire of the laws, the rights of the throne, and even social order itself. — Napoleon Bonaparte

If fiction and fantasy books are escapism, then let an author write them so as to better equip the reader to face reality by the end. — Brett Armstrong

At that time, I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace, which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well, if it was painful to read, it was also painful to write. I had pains in my chest for two years while I was writing that book. — Jonathan Kozol

Fantasy is escapism, but wait ... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human. — Terry Pratchett

I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism. — James Cameron

The media doesn't always reflect reality. — John Catsimatidis

Things of this world are in so constant a flux, that nothing remains long in the same state. — John Locke