Nick Yarris Quotes

Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.

Even if I was in prison, I could be free in my head. I can adapt easily.

Rebellion is what you make of it. When you've been on a tour bus for two months straight, and then you get in your car and drive wherever you want, that can feel rebellious.

I went to Paris, I went to France, I went to England, I went to Ireland. In my mind, I can go wherever I wanted to go. I left death row every day.

On any given day, if I play the guitar, I can put myself somewhere. I always thought, 'This is the way you go.' It's like a magic carpet, see?

I pray, read the word, and then creative stuff happens here. Problem-solving and all of that comes into that space. So 'Da Box' actually represents my sanctuary and that time. I might look trapped in a box, but I'm actually more free in that box than anyone on the outside looking in or in any other space in my life.

Artemis women often have difficult childhoods. She's the kid who seeks comfort in the woods, or animals, or books. If trapped in an authoritarian family, she blends in to get by - but keeps a fierce autonomy inside her head and heart, looking to the day she breaks free.

The Khmer Rouge can't destroy me. I still have my imagination and am capable of making films. I am not locked up.

You know the day destroys the night, Night divides the day, Tried to run, Tried to hide, Break on through to the other side...

Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.

For some people, life is the process of knocking through walls to get out. For others, it is the building of walls.

as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.

This world and life of ours are filled with inequalities. The worst possible use to make of this fact, however, is to allow resentments to possess us. All of us have imagined limitations, but we have also the privilege of pushing them aside, and spreading our lives out! We never know any of our limitations until we put ourselves to the test. There are always "growing pains" working within us.

I like the fact that I can go away and lose myself so I don't have to live in the world of courage that everyone else does. I like creating, it's what I do, and acting allows me to stretch all those different muscles in all kinds of ways. That's pretty cool.

The world like our heads was meant to be escaped from, they are prisons world and head alike.

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I'll rise!

What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space so much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom.

...being Lulu, it made me realize that all my life I've been living in a small, square room, with no windows and no doors. And I was fine. I was happy, even. I thought. Then someone came along and showed me there was a door in the room. One that I'd never even seen before. Then he opened it for me. Held my hand as I walked through it. And for one perfect day, I was on the other side. I was somewhere else. Someone else. And then he was gone, and I was thrown back into my little room. And now, no matter what I do, I can't seem to find that door.

Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Break the Shell”: “Child, it’s time to break the shell Life’s gonna hurt but it’s meant to be felt You cannot touch the sky from inside yourself You cannot fly until you break the shell.

Even as a kid, my memories are of books taking me out of myself.

There is a doctrine whispered in secret that a man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.