Quit Pro Quotes

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Ursula K. LeGuin: I’m a sort of ignorant, imperfect Taoist, and in a sense the point of trying to follow the Tao is that you have to quit trying to do it.

I’ve found this to be true in my art. When I’m trying to control the story and make it do something, it doesn’t work. When I quit trying, I get to a whole deeper level in my writing. When I let the story tell me what it is.

Letting your work do itself this way requires, of course, an extremely intense, alert attitude. It’s not passive; it’s actively passive, passively active. One of those great Chinese ideas you chase all your life.

Ray Suarez: I quit my last job. I had been at the NBC-owned TV station in Chicago for over seven years, and I quit and went to NPR, where I work now.

I could see where broadcasting was heading. Every time those of us in the newsroom thought we’d hit bottom, well, there was another, lower bottom waiting down the road. I got to the point where I could hardly watch what I was producing on television anymore. My wife would say, “Oh, here’s your story,” and I would walk out of the room. That was a good sign that it was time to go.

My quit felt dramatic. I walked into my news director’s office and just put a letter on his desk. It was just six lines long, and I said “I just don’t think there’s any point to my being here anymore; therefore, I quit. Let’s arrange my final payoff and I’ll work for two more weeks.”

But then I talked to reporters about why I’d left, and my station decided that they didn’t need me there for two more weeks!

Here’s what happened. The morning after I quit, some reporter from a local news station called me. It was six o’clock in the morning, and I had just awoken from a deep sleep, so I was sort of befuddled. I gave a slow, thoughtful, calm rundown of the reasons I was leaving.

Then I went back to sleep, woke up, turned on the radio, and heard the anchor say, “Take this job and shove it! That’s what a local reporter told NBC today!” I thought, “Oh my God, I’ve really done it now!” I went to the studio of the radio station and said, “Look, I never said anything remotely like ‘take this job and shove it!’ I quit out of regret, not out of malice. You guys made it sound like I was giving them the finger, and nothing could be further from the truth.”

It was a bittersweet experience—but it sort of proved my point about commercial broadcasting.

Katha Pollitt: I’m planning to quit voting for Clinton. I decided that the lesser of two evils isn’t good enough for me. I came across a book about the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948 and noticed that the arguments against voting for his third party candidacy are still being made. If you don’t vote for the Democrats it’ll bring fascism, if you don’t vote for the Democrats the sky will fall. Well, constant voting for Democrats has brought us to where we are now!

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