The pursuit of art is the pursuit of liberty

The pursuit of art, then, by artist or audience, is the pursuit of liberty. If you accept that, you see at once why truly serious people reject and mistrust the arts, labelling them as "escapism". The captured soldier tunnelling out of prison, the runaway slave, and Solzhenitsyn in exile, are escapists. Aren't they? The definition also helps explain why all healthy children can sing, dance, paint, and play with words; why art is an increasingly important element in psychotherapy; why Winston Churchill painted, why mothers sing cradle-songs, and what is wrong with Plato's Republic.

Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (The Orion Publishing Group, 2015) p. 6

Romantic love, the supreme intoxication

For romantic love, the supreme intoxication of which we are capable, is more than an intensifying of life; it is a defiance of it; it belongs to those evasions of reality through excessive stimulus which Spinoza called 'titivations'.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 89

Cowardice in living

Cowardice in living: without health and courage we cannot face the present or the germ of the future in the present, and we take refuge in evasion. Evasion through comfort, through society, through acquisitiveness, through the book-bed-bath defence system, above all through the past, the flight to the romantic womb of history, into primitive myth-making.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 75

Inlåst i konsten

Delta inte! Vägra! Det var mina imperativ. Jag vägrade erkänna den samtidighet i nu och liv som vi alla är underkastade. Jag ville nå fram till den samtidighet i konst som är oberoende av dagen. Jag låste in mig. Och därinne byggde jag den katapult som skulle slunga mig ut i världen.

Sven Lindqvist, Myten om Wu Tao-tzu (Månpocket, 2013) p.153

Man drar en magisk cirkel omkring sig, och stänger ute allt som inte passar ihop med ens hemliga lekar. Varje gång livet slår sönder cirkeln blir lekarna små och grå och löjeväckande. Då drar man genast en ny cirkel; bygger nya skydd.

Ingmar Bergman, Såsom i en spegel (SF, 1961)