Reading As An Escape Quotes & Sayings

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself. — Rebecca Mead

...literacy is as vital as food, security, limiting population growth, and control of the environment.

Education, after all, is the one issue that affects every other one. I think of it in the same way as dropping a pebble into a pond and getting a ripple effect. Educated people make more money and are more likely to escape poverty. Educated parents raise healthier children.

...The list goes on, just as ripples in a body of water emanate outward. — John Wood

Reading is a dialog with oneself; it is self-reflection, which cultivates profound humanity. Reading is therefore essential to our development. It expands and enriches the personality like a seed that germinates after a long time and sends forth many blossom-laden branches.
People who can say of a book, 'this changed my life' truly understand the meaning of happiness. Reading that sparks inner revolution is desperately needed to escape drowning in the rapidly advancing information society. Reading is more than intellectual ornamentation; it is a battle for the establishment for the self, a ceaseless challenge that keeps us young and vigorous. — Daisaku Ikeda

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

I wanted to escape Small Town U.S.A. To dismiss the boundaries, to explore. My life experience came from watching movies, TV, and reading books and magazines. When your culture comes from watching TV everyday, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities. — Trent Reznor

Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking. (Jincy Willett) — Jincy Willett

Mature readers consider reading an integral part of life. It is not something they do only to relax or to escape or if there is nothing good on television. It is something they plan for in each day, and if the day develops so that they have no time for it, they may become restless, rather like joggers who miss their run. Some - busy parents, for example - stay up late at night to read their daily quota after the house is quiet, acknowledging that having balance in their lives is more dependent on reading time than on sleep. — Judith Wynn Halsted

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw. — David Mitchell

Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same. — Emma Donoghue

Reading wasn't an attempt to educate myself. It was my chief escape from a world that, although gorgeous in landscape and rich with mountain culture, didn't provide what I needed - the promise of adventure, a life beyond the perimeter of hills. I often fantasized that I'd been adopted and had mysterious powers such as flying or teleportation. Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within the pages of a novel, I was unafraid: of my father, of dogs, snakes, and the bully across the creek; of older boys who drove hot rods close enough to make me jump in the ditch; of armed men parked near the bootlegger. — Chris Offutt

I was always able to lose myself in reading. Books were a necessary escape I always gladly jumped into headfirst. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

As children we read to escape - to enter fantasy worlds where a bespectacled boy can discover he's a wizard or a brave girl can find a magical passage through a wardrobe. But we also read to find reflections of ourselves. — Chelsey Philpot

Reading is my escape when reality sucks — Wency June Z. Libot

I run to get out, when I have been stuck inside, reading to escape from life, not even able to sit up straight in my tiny bunk. I run to feel like I am doing something, when I am overwhelmed by all the things I can't do anything about. — Jay Allison

I loved books. Loved reading. It not only gave me an escape from my own world, but opened a door into other worlds. It allowed me, at the beginning of my marriage, to suffer with some grace. As long as I had another world to go to, what did I care about how small and strange and terrifying my own life had gotten? — Molly O'Keefe

Reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life. — Karin Slaughter

The best thing about reading is to escape from your life, to be able to live hundreds or even thousands of different lives. — Anna Todd

You don't read to exercise the mind but to take voyages — John Geddes

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors
we hope
of your life come from reading fiction. — Orson Scott Card

Reading is, at its best, not an escape; it is genuine experience. A novel is not a monologue, but a conversation, a collaboration between writer and reader, an invaluable exchange of human conditions. — Jonathan Evison

I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living. — Raymond Chandler

The books my mother read and reread provided a broader, more adventurous world, and escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted. If she couldn't change the reality of her situation, she could change her perception of it. She could enter into the lives of the characters in her books, sharing their journeys while she remained seated in her chair. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door). — William Maxwell

Reading is the perfect escape from whatever ails you. — Jessica Spotswood

Moreover, people have become accustomed to reading to escape as opposed to reading to think. — Leigh M. Lane

Reading is the unbelievably healthy way
my attention deficit disorder medicates itself.
Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to
make contact with reality after a day of making things up. — Nora Ephron

People talk about books being an escape, but here on the tube, this one feels more like a lifeline ... The motion of the train makes her head rattle, but her eyes lock on the words the way a figure skater might choose a focal point as she spins, and just like that, she's grounded again. — Jennifer E. Smith

Books. The more I thought about how to stop and get myself back together as one sane, whole person, the more I thought about books. I thought about escape. Not running to escape but reading to escape. Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that "words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living." That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again. — Nina Sankovitch

Books are an amazing thing. Anyone who thinks of them as an escape from reality or as something you should get your nose out of and go outside and play, or as merely a distraction or an amusement or a waste of time is - dead wrong.
Books are the most important
the most powerful
the most beautiful thing
humans have ever created. — Connie Willis

Reading is a sage way to bump up against life. Reading may be an escape, but it is not an escape from my own life and problems. It is an escape from the narrow boundaries of being only me. Reading in some wonderful ways helps me find out who I am. When she was a young girl Patricia MacLachlan's mother encouraged her to "read a book and find out who you are." And it is true that in some ways reading defines me as it refines me. Reading enlarges my vision of the world; it helps me understand someone who is different from me. It makes me bigger on the inside. We tend to see the world from our own perspective; it is good to see it from the eyes of others. Good literature helps me understand who I am in relation to what others experience. Far from being an escape from reality, good literature is a window into reality. I read to feel life. — Gladys M. Hunt

These stories were very old, as old as people, and they had survived because they were very powerful indeed. They were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside. They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves. They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied. The world of the old tales existed parallel to ours, but sometimes the walls separating the two became so thing and brittle that the two worlds started to blend into each other. That was when the trouble started. That was when the bad things came. That was when the Crooked Man began to appear to David. — John Connolly

Reading is a gift. It's something you can do almost anytime and anywhere. It can be a tremendous way to learn, relax, and even escape. So, enough about the virtues of reading. Time to read on. — Richard Carlson

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss. — Nora Ephron

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was. — Lin Yutang

But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with no borders and few restrictions, which I have taken to calling "the Republic of Imagination." I think of it as Nabokov's "somehow, somewhere" or Alice's backyard, a world that runs parallel to the real one, whose occupants need no passport or documentation. The only requirements for entry are an open mind, a restless desire to know and an indefinable urge to escape the mundane. — Azar Nafisi

What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading. — Alice James

Through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an "escape from time" comparable to the "emegence from time" effected by myths. ( ... ) Reading projects him out if his personal duration and incorporates him into other rythms, makes him live in another "history". — Mircea Eliade

A person can escape an ingrained pattern of mental incapacity or 'non compos mentis' ("no power of the mind") by reading, writing, thinking, and studying their environment for telling external determinates that will shape a journey of the mind, body, and soul. — Kilroy J. Oldster

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it ... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. — C.S. Lewis

Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough
I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too. — Nicole Christie

There are so many books left to read. For that reason alone it is worth going on living. Books make me happy, the help me escape from reality. — Felix J. Palma

She read novels. One book after another, sometimes at the rate of one a day, for a solid year. An acceptable form of escape that didn't leave a hangover. — Wendy Wax

Every time you think of escaping mentally or physically, grab the book that lies inches away from your heart. — Muna Adnan Naqi

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the "real" everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human. — Susan Sontag

Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don't realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even then any movie. — Eckhart Tolle

It's awfully good of some people to have asked me to take the job, but I'd rather read about a grand escape than plan one. Besides, I'm terrible at keeping secrets and I hate to scheme against people. It seems rude. I don't deal with guilt well and I'm worried we might hurt some feelings in the process of defending ourselves. Also, I am juggling a couple of books. Being a full-time conspirator would take away from my reading time. — Joe Hill

I walked to the bookcase and examined the storybooks inside. As a girl, I had dreamed of having stacks of books at my disposal
stories to get lost in, other worlds to live in when mine was so bleak. — Sarah Jio

I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed ... and as it was for me when I was young and surrounded by siblings, as it is today when I am surrounded by children, reading continues to provide an escape from a crowded house into an imaginary room of one's own. — Anna Quindlen

And if I really can see the future, then what does it mean? Is there any sense in our lives if everything is already out there, just waiting to happen? For if that were so, then life would be a horrible monster indeed, with no chance of escape from fate, from destiny. It would be like reading a book, but reading it backwards, from the final chapter down to chapter one, so that the end is already known to you. — Marcus Sedgwick

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

Sometimes you wish to escape to another part of the book.
You stop reading and riffle the pages, catching sight of the story as it races ahead, not above the world but through it, through forests and complications, the chaos of intentions and cities.
As you near the last few pages you are hurtling through the book at increasing speed, until all is a blur of restlessness, and then suddenly your thumb loses its grip and you sail out of the story and back into yourself. The book is once again a fragile vessel of cloth and paper. You have gone everywhere and nowhere. — Thomas Wharton

As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else's trouble. — Octavia E. Butler

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life. — Barbara Kingsolver

Reading is a way to escape the inescapable — Louise