Quit Pro Quotes
(Page 2 of 3)
September/October 1996
Martha Coventry, Utne Reader
It was a bittersweet experience--but it sort of proved my point about commercial broadcasting.
RELATED CONTENT
Molefi Kete Asante January/February 1995 Utne Reader Molefi Kete Asante is a genial, determi...
The Fine Art of Breaking Free...
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to leave...
Pico Iyer
Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn't agree with you, but because you don't agree with something. It's not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one's journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting--whether a job or a habit--means taking a turn so as to be sure you're still moving in the direction of your highest dreams.
For years, for example, I dithered and debated about whether to leave the graduate school where I was incarcerated and try the precarious life of a free-lance writer. Finally, I gathered the resolve to pitch myself into the black hole of unemployment--and, two weeks after I made the decision, out of nowhere a perfect job appeared and whisked me into a life far richer than I could ever have imagined. I've always thought that, in some mysterious way, through the kind of logic that we don't understand (and therefore ought to trust), it was the very fact of summoning enough nerve to quit what I was doing that somehow threw open the doors to new possibility. In the leap of faith came the destination.
A few years later, when I was beginning to enjoy that job too much--to the point where I could see myself spending a lifetime there--I left that, too, for a more uncertain kind of life, telling myself that continuing the job would represent an invisible kind of quitting--an abdication of possibility--and would leave me with live unlived that I would one day, and too late, regret.
So quitting to me is often a way of waking up--of choosing to see things differently and reorienting oneself towards the things one loves. It is both the result ofa fruitful disorientation and the catalyst for an even more fruitful one. And, once one has quit, one must learn, like Lot's wife, never to look back; for if you think back on what you've left, you haven't really left it at all.
Kate Bornstein
For nearly fifty years, I've been quitting identities. I left the torment of being a boy to join the safety of being a man. I left the ruin of being a man to join the comfort of being a woman. I left the sadness of being a woman to join the strength of being a lesbian. I left the clinging of being lesbian to join--and leave, in turn---riot grrrl, femme, dyke, transgender. Finally I realized that as long as there was a specific identity I was quitting, I'd only get stuck in yet another one. I think it's identity itself I want to quit now.
Quentin Crisp
When I was recently in Germany, people asked me why I had left England. Why hadn't I stayed in order to make England better for the gay people? I must admit it had never occured to me that I was somehow forsaking my post.