Emotional Escapism Quotes

Cinema and emotion trump reality for me.

Her kitsch was the image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving mother and a wise father. It was an image that took shape in her after the death of her parents. The less her life resembled the sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic, and more than once she shed tears when the ungrateful daughter in a sentimental film embraced the neglected father as the windows of the happy family's house shone out into the dying day.

The philosopher says think your way out. The sensualist says play your way out but none of it works.

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

I wish to be moved. I cannot feel in life. I must have others do it for me in theater.

But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.

So you find yourself surrounded by death and horror in the world, and you escape it into lust. But lust has no duration; it leaves you again in the desert.

To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination.

There's something about some of my favorite musicals that they put me in a sort of heightened state where I feel like I'm floating out of the theater rather than walking out.

There is a world of science necessary in choosing books. I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel, or the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-draught for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he was about.

This medium that we're working in - film and television - for an audience, it's like you live through these characters because it's things you can't do in real life. Places you're not prepared to go in real life as a decent human being, anyway. Because if you're a conscientious person, so you live kind of vicariously through these people.

We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.

Faced with today's problems and disappointments , many people will try to escape from their responsibility. Escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.

My love affairs were more often about the fantasy than the actual person I was involved with.

I can easily lose myself emotionally in absolute Hollywood garbage.

When the holidays approach and the weather turns cold, you spend your nights watching and rewatching saccharine movies until you fall asleep, hoping for some gleam of happiness or catharsis that never comes, a version of life that looks like a Hallmark movie or where your idealized prince finally shows up.

We often mistake the artificial chemical and psychological thrill of fake edges for the real. In fact we often seek them out as a substitute for the reality of change, growth and exploration. Our minds and bodies help us in this, as they react much the same to this simulations as to the real world.

I have an idea that most of all he is running away from love, because it's too big and too demanding. He's running away from us--from you, from me, from his sister, from himself, too. Who wants to be himself, who wants to be so little, and so captured and limited?

Dreams, dreams. I walk them; I live them. I delude myself with them. It's a wonder I can spot reality anymore."... He turned from me with a sigh. "I need a drink."... "Oh, good. That'll fix everything. I'm glad in a world gone mad, you've still got your old standbys."... "What do you expect me to do?" he asked. "You could... You could... Well, now that you're here, you could help us. Plus, this guy we're meeting. He's another spirit user."... "Yeah, that's exactly what I want. To help my girlfriend get her old boyfriend back. " He turned away again, and I heard him mutter, "I need two drinks."

They make a secret pact with themelves never to think about the future.

An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers', like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets.

I feel like every night, when you see a really good production of 'Romeo and Juliet' or something, you should hope that it ends differently. That's why we watch our favorite movies again and again.

At the end of the Depression, people were perhaps looking for something to cheer themselves up. They fell in love with a dog and a little girl. It won't happen again.

One of the reasons people like romances is that they're artificially shaped to give a pattern and meaning. It's not as messy as everyday life or as difficult or thorny.

When you aren't drinking or using drugs or spending lots of money on fancy toys or basking in the glow of fame or working all the time or eating your way through the refrigerator, being hateful and angry is a very handy shield from the truth. It lets you focus on everyone else's shortcomings, and all the ways they have let you down. You can bemoan how all these broken people keep finding you somehow. That way you don't have to focus on what really matters -- the tough work of fiing what is broken inside you.