It Depends on whether You Were Born to

In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn. That's OK; he's a songwriter, after all, and he needs simple choices like that in his songs. But nobody ever writes about how it is possible to escape and rot - how escapes can go off at half-cock, how you can leave the suburbs for the city but end up living a limp suburban life anyway.

Nick Hornby, High Fidelity, p. 136 (ch. 11)