Self Escape Quotes

The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

Nor from hell One step no more than from himself can fly By change of place.

Even when I became the typical shy adolescent, I never minded performing. I felt there was a kind of safety, a protection about being on stage, about losing myself in another character.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

As Lucretius says: 'Thus ever from himself doth each man flee.' But what does he gain if he does not escape from himself? He ever follows himself and weighs upon himself as his own most burdensome companion. And so we ought to understand that what we struggle with is the fault, not of the places, but of ourselves

there’s really nowhere else I can go, and even if there were, it wouldn’t make a difference because I’d just be running from myself, and you can’t do that no matter how hard you try, and trying hard is what got you in this predicament in the first place.

When I look back at what I've written and try to explain it, it doesn't help, but it helps to be in a process of writing. It's the same thing with reading - you lose yourself when you read as well. When I was younger I used literature that way, it was just escapism, a tool to run away from things.

I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don't know the way out.

Not even for an hour can you bear to be alone, nor can you advantageously apply your leisure time, but you endeavor, a fugitive and wanderer, to escape from yourself, now vainly seeking to banish remorse by wine, and now by sleep; but the gloomy companion presses on you, and pursues you as you fly.

I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.

I found out that drama was a fascinating exercise as a way to get out of my self and into somebody else's head.

I think everybody, or the great majority of human beings, have this aspiration to become other: to live a different identity, at least for a while.

I never feel like I'm looking to get away from my own self. Not as much as I'm trying to get inside the mind of somebody else.

I believed, when I entered this convent, I was escaping from myself, but alas, poor me, I brought myself with me!

Where was my heart to flee for refuge from my heart? Whither was I to fly, where I would not follow? In what place should I not be prey to myself?

To be honest, acting was something where I got a chance to be somebody else and forget about the situation I was in.

You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself.

What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn't you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed.

I read to be taken out of myself, to become ecstatic.

The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.

As you mature and gain a semblance of wisdom and a sense of what life is all about... this is by no means true of everyone, but a lot of actors like to escape themselves. Inhabiting another person's persona is often a good way of escaping yourself.

What is the holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary escape from the torment of Self. It is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life.