Escape The Present Quotes

#1. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. ( ... ) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

John Green

#2. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present. - Alaska

John Green

#3. Every boy was supposed to come into the world equipped with a father whose prime function was to be our father and show us how tobe men. He can escape us, but we can never escape him. Present or absent, dead or alive, real or imagined, our father is the main man in our masculinity.

Frank Pittman

#4. The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -henceforth?- the subject to which you are condemned.

Howard Nemerov

#5. True, man cannot escape death. But for the present he is alive; and life, not death, takes hold of him ... It is mans innate nature that he seeks to preserve and to strengthen his life, that he is discontented and aims at removing uneasiness, that he is in search of what may be called happiness.

Ludwig Von Mises

#6. Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future

Salvador Dali

#7. Escapology has one thing going for it that probably made Harry Houdini such a superstar in his day and a legend in the present. Everyone wants to escape from something. Taxes, contracts, illness, work, the multitude of burdens that we chafe under are shadows from which we want to escape.

James Randi

#8. You cannot escape the results of your thoughts. Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain or rise with your thoughts, your vision, your ideal. You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration.

James Lane Allen

#9. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.

David Foster Wallace

#10. The nostalgia of a moment's love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present.

Mike Norton

#11. I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:
The past, present, and future walk into a bar - it was tense.

Kelli Russell Agodon

#12. The worst of depression lies in a present moment that cannot escape the past it idealizes or deplores.

Andrew Solomon

#13. That's what Proust calls it. On those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. That's the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you're alive - the backward ache. That's what music is.

Adam Haslett

#14. You can't escape the past in Paris, and yet what's so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn't seem to burden.

Allen Ginsberg

#15. He had understood long ago that the past was no better than the present. That was as plain as day. One had to try to escape, to wrestle free from every era, so as not to be devoured by it.

Lyudmila Ulitskaya

#16. They say you can't escape your past, but I don't believe that. I believe you escape it every day, over and over again, always cognizant of the difference between past and present

Susan Richards

#17. I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable
indescribable
my misery amazing.

Charles Dickens

#18. Life is always sad. That's what makes suicide so tempting because life is all that we really have and haven't. Death makes us equals, too, because the foul and the good all die. The past, the present, and the future-what escape is there from these? None-and yet sometimes we are life's happy victims.

F. Sionil Jose

#19. To escape the distress caused by regret for the past or fear about the future, this is the rule to follow: leave the past to the infinite mercy of God, the future to His good Providence, give the present wholly to His love by being faithful to His grace.

Jean-Pierre De Caussade

#20. They realize their ultimate doom, but they are fatalists, incapable of resistance or escape. Not one of the present generation has been out of sight of these walls.

Robert E. Howard

#21. What she liked the most about drinking was not being present, that feeling of self-evasion, of disconnection, of liberation, of escape. Alcohol offered her an excellent alternative to being herself without actually dying.

Laura Esquivel

#22. Escape is the byword - forwards, backwards, or sideways - into alcohol, busyness, good works, passivity, fantasy, or even madness. For the reality of the present and the immediate future seem even more frightening today

Peter Marshall

#23. Be present, from moment to moment, right in the middle of the real stream of time. That gives you spiritual security. That is why in Buddhism we don't try to escape from impermanence; we face time itself in our daily living.

Dainin Katagiri

#24. There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

Roland Barthes

#25. Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.

Simone De Beauvoir

#26. Other times escape our notice, slipping by while we are preoccupied, and we do not appreciate their enormity until it's too late to do anything but regret that we had not paid more attention in the present.

Kevin Hearne

#27. He'd never asked her whether she would prefer to have a master again, and now the thought of such a conversation made his throat tighten. In a sense it would be like asking someone whether they'd like to escape their present difficulties by killing themselves

Helene Wecker

#28. There is no border in my films. You can see yourself in these stories. This is the greatest thing about the power of cinema. It's very present. It's all there. You can't escape it.

Lav Diaz

#29. Don't get caught in "Waiting". When I 'Get This' then I will be able to fully 'Live'. Escape the time dominant mind by fully being here 'NOW'.

Matthew Donnelly

#30. I've always been interested in foreign relations. It's my belief that study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present rather than an escape from it.

Elizabeth Kostova

#31. How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

Christopher Hitchens

#32. I meditate not to escape the world but instead to be completely present.

Joe Sacco

#33. I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#34. Christians do not avail ourselves of Plato's safety-hatch and say that the real world is not a thing of space, time, and matter, but another world into which we can escape. We say that the present world is the real one, and that it's in bad shape, but expecting to be repaired.

N. T. Wright

#35. He had no more imaginary space, nowhere he could escape to, no more expectations, all he could do was make himself available to the present moment, to what was immeasurable, the terrible profusion of moments that make up a day.

Laurence Cosse