Lynda Barry Quotes

I think I'm always running away from somewhere, and to me, theatre's always felt like a good place to run away to.

I take refuge in my books.

School was my sanctuary.

A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That's all any room is.

Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.

I still frequent my parents' house. I go there to escape, back to the bedroom that I grew up in. Just to sit there and feel small.

As a kid, I used to go to the library and take out all the art books.

When I was growing up, the place I felt least alone was when I was reading.

I think for me, home needs to be a sanctuary. I need to feel like I've escaped the day when I get home.

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.

As a kid, books were my great escape and my salvation.

Music should be your escape.

Films were really my church. As a young kid, it was movies and books; it was nothing remarkable, really, just that is where I felt soothed, that is where I felt most myself... safest.

I just absolutely needed the theatre so desperately - it was my fate; it was where I was running towards. It was the place where I found peace and survival and all kinds of things.

Literature has always been the greatest fuel for my imagination.

Art should be an oasis: a place or refuge from the hardness of life.

The library is a place where most of the things I came to value as an adult had their beginnings.

I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head.

I have my books and my poetry to protect me

Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.

It was actually books that started to make those pockets of freedom, which I hadn't otherwise experienced. I do see them as talismans, as sacred objects. I see them as something that will protect me, I suppose, that will save me from things that I feel are threatening. I still think that; it doesn't change. It doesn't change, having money, being successful. So from the very first, if I was hurt in some way, then I would take a book -- which was very difficult for me to buy when I was little -- and I would go up into the hills, and that is how I would assuage my hurt.

Half the time I pick up a book, that's what I'm trying to get.

Friendship is like those ancient altars where the unhappy, and even the guilty, found a sure asylum.

A university is a reading and discussion club. If students knew how to use the library, they wouldn't need the rest of the buildings. The faculty's job, in great part, is to teach students how to use a library in a living way. All a student should really need is access to the library and a place to sleep.