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"After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,' he said. 'To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident to one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact."
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Exlpore more Escape quotes
"I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible."
"To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape."
"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."
"Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book."
"No one loves us here, let's go to Mars."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt
"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."
"To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone."
"Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist."
"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."
"On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business."
"Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture."
"We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people " the ancients no less than us " have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self."
"When we are sad-at least I am like this-it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change."
"In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out."
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