Escapes

Famous quotes containing the word escapes:

    That reality is ‘independent’ means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.
    William James (1842–1910)

    Making the best of things is ... a damn poor way of dealing with them.... My whole life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand [ellipses in source].
    Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)

    To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)