I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. T.C. Boyle
About This Quote

The idea that you should quit when you "can't take it anymore" is probably not the best way to go about things. This can result in loss of money, loss of friends, and other major setbacks. When you see someone who is quitting, or who has quit, this will likely make you think that they are weak. However, what Nelson Mandela was saying is that the power to get up again should be something that people aspire to achieve.

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More Quotes By T.C. Boyle
  1. Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you...
  2. I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds...
  3. But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories–each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it.", 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]
  4. First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or hear or smell or taste, you have something.
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