Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Forster

Escapism gets treated like a moral failing: a cheap dodge from reality, a sign you can’t handle the news cycle, your job, your grief. Margaret Forster flips that scolding script with a bright, almost defiant simplicity. “As though it’s something nasty” pinpoints the real target: not escapism itself, but the cultural reflex to shame it. The line is built like a rebuke to gatekeepers who police what counts as “serious” art and what gets dismissed as mere comfort.

Forster’s “wonderful” isn’t naïve; it’s strategic. She’s reclaiming pleasure as a legitimate aesthetic and psychological need. The subtext is that constant confrontation with “the real” can be its own kind of performance - a badge of virtue that leaves people depleted. Escapism, in her framing, becomes restoration: the mind taking a breath, the imagination rehearing possibilities, the self stepping outside its assigned role. That’s not running away; it’s regrouping.

Context matters. Forster wrote in a literary culture that often rewarded grit and austerity, especially when women’s reading tastes were caricatured as frivolous. Her defense of escapism quietly defends readers, too: ordinary people using books as shelter, as rehearsal space, as private freedom. It’s also a sideways argument about fiction’s social value. The escape isn’t an exit from life; it’s a return with more stamina, more empathy, sometimes even more clarity. Calling it “wonderful” dares us to admit how much survival depends on imagined elsewhere.