mental refuge Quotes

Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.

Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people-- people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

If I ever felt like I was getting lost in the hurricane that was storming around Nirvana, I'd just go back to Virginia.

You are safe inside your mind. No one can reach you there.

Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape.

I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping.

I felt impotent and out of control, which I really, really hate. I had to find sanctuary in a place where I could gather my thoughts and regain my strength.

When I'm doing sports, I don't feel anything at all. I enjoy the moment. It's a safe haven. But once you try to let someone inside your soul, you become vulnerable. You have to be comfortable in your own skin. I don't open myself up like that to a lot of people. It takes courage.

I think the most privacy I had was when the game was going on.

The mind which is free from passions is a citadel, for man has nothing more secure to which he can fly for refuge and for the future be inexpugnable . He then who has not seen this is an ignorant man: but he who has seen it and does not fly to this refuge is unhappy.

I still close my eyes and go home - I can always draw from that.

For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need.

I'm a grenade, I just want to stay away from people and read books, and think.

Art is a spiritual, immaterial respite from the hardships of life.

I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.

Each found her greatest safety in silence.

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.

Evil isn't prejudiced. It doesn't care what you look like; it just wants a place to rest. It's up to you whether you give it that place.

His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough"(72).

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.

I spend most of my time in my head. You can always work out solutions and satisfactions there. Maybe you can't actually bring them about, but there's usually a pleasant pillow of time between imagining you can, and realizing you cannot.

I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn't find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.

A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself.

Writing is my vacation from living.