Tracy Kidder Quotes

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.

Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.

I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

I usually write about ordinary people and ordinary things, but Paul Farmer is the least ordinary person I've ever met... He's the leader of a small group of people who hope to cure a sick world, and I hope my book can help in some small way.

The only real nation is humanity

...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.

That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

The problem is fundamental... It is as if a secret committee, now lost to history, has made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to declared that all of them should do it.

What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative

... "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why.

I do believe in God. I think God has given so much power to people, and intelligence, and said, 'Well, you are on your own. Maybe I'm tired, I need a nap. You are mature. Why don't you look after yourselves?' And I think He's been sleeping too much.