Escape characters are only necessary in strings enclosed in double quotes, which PHP will attempt to parse. If your string is in single quotes, php will happily accept embedded double quotes (it just won't detect variables!):
echo 'This "might" be a good day to die...';
Of course, you can also use [man]chr()[/man] to return a specific character:
echo 'But '.chr(34).'I'.chr(34).' would rather not find out!';