Life & Wisdom Quote by A. C. Benson

Benson’s line is a polite Edwardian sentence with a faintly subversive undertow: it flatters literature while quietly indicting the life that produces it. “All the best stories” sounds like a roomy aesthetic claim, but he snaps it shut into a single obsession - escape - as if the entire library were a well-decorated emergency exit. The insistence (“in reality,” “the only thing,” “all and at all times”) isn’t just emphasis; it’s a refusal to let readers pretend they come to books for virtue, instruction, or taste. We come because we want out.

The cleverness is that “escape” operates on two levels at once. It’s the obvious narrative engine - jailbreaks, quests, romances, reinventions. It’s also a psychological confession. Benson, writing in a culture of duty, respectability, and tight social choreography, hints that the self is permanently overcrowded: by class expectations, by work, by propriety, by the mind’s own loops. Escape isn’t merely from prisons or villains; it’s from the ordinary surveillance of being a person in public.

There’s a modern ring to it because it anticipates the way entertainment gets morally policed. Benson preempts that argument: escapism isn’t a guilty pleasure, it’s the core feature. Even “serious” stories are structured as exits - from ignorance to knowledge, isolation to intimacy, stasis to change. The subtext is mildly bleak and oddly comforting: if everyone wants out, no one has to pretend they’re above it. Literature doesn’t rescue us from the desire to flee; it gives that desire a form we can live with.