[All] reading whatever is an escape. It involves a temporary transference of the mind from our actual surroundings to things merely imagined or conceived. This happens when we read history or science no less than when we read fictions. All such escape is from the same thing: immediate, concrete actuality. The important question is what we escape to… Escape is not necessarily joined to escapism.
- C. S. Lewis, quoted in Leland Ryken’s Realms of Gold, p. 159
