"Nonsense. You're only saying that because no one ever has."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. "
— William S. Burroughs

"But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"But the beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair"
— Relient K

"But nothing was a important as escaping Evernight or the ‘destiny’ my parents and teachers had decided for me. I had only one chance to be free and to be with the guy I loved. I intended to take it.
"
— Claudia Gray (Stargazer)

"It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?"
— Søren Kierkegaard

"Use them with care, and use them with respect as to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary research tool. Go banging about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get into a really bad place, psychologically. Know what you're using, decide just why you're using it, and you can have a rich experience. They're not addictive, and they're certainly not escapist, either, but they're exceptionally valuable tools for understanding the human mind, and how it works."
— Alexander Shulgin (Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story)

"Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come."
— Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)

"'Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.'

'It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.'
"
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings)

""The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.""
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"Well, I had no choice, did I? I'm a woman. Women are obliged to be far more skillful than men. You can ruin our reputation and our life with a few well-chosen words. So, of course, I had to invent, not only myself, but ways of escape no one has every thought of before. And I've succeeded because I've always known I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own. "
— Marquise de Merteuil

"You are aware of only one unrest;
Oh, never learn to know the other!
Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And one is striving to forsake its brother.
Unto the world in grossly loving zest,
With clinging tendrils, one adheres;
The other rises forcibly in quest
Of rarefied ancestral spheres.
If there be spirits in the air
That hold their sway between the earth and sky,
Descend out of the golden vapors there
And sweep me into iridescent life.
Oh, came a magic cloak into my hands
To carry me to distant lands,
I should not trade it for the choicest gown,
Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Faust)

"Yo pensaba que también podía ser heroico escaparse por gusto, sin más, por amor a la libertad y a la alegría—no a la alegría impuesta oficial y mesurada, sino a la carcajada y a la canción que brotan de una fuente cuyas aguas nadie canaliza."
— Carmen Martin Gaite (El cuarto de atrás)

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
— Criss Angel

"Reality shackles the mind."
— Zachary Keith

"Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom."
— D.H. Lawrence (Studies in Classic American Literature)

"Why live for today, if today isn't where I want to be? Maybe I'd rather waste my time away trying to figure out how I'm going to escape tommorrow..."
— Maxx:Melanie

"Please don't worry, I am doing fine. You're much too busy to even find the time. So use your chemicals and take this to your grave; the boys you left, are men you didn't raise."
— Ronnie Radke Escape the Fate

"Through the fire and the flames
A sea of dead drives men insane
We march the fight into the cold
This is as far as it will go
The battle ends on top of here
This is where we conquer fear
On blackout armed with our swords
This war is ours.
Yeah.
This war is ours."
— Craig Mabbit Escape the Fate