Tracy Kidder Quotes
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What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative
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The ocean doesn't care about you. It makes your boat feel tiny. The oceans are great promoters of religion, or at least of humility-but not in everyone.
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I always want to write something better than the last book.
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I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.
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At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.
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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.
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Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.
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Paul Farmer has helped to build amazing health care system in one of the poorest areas of Haiti. He founded Partners in Health, which serves the destitute and the sick in many parts of the world from Haiti to Boston and from Russia to Peru.
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If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don't like is bound to happen
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People say you cant teach writing, but I think thats nonsense.
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The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression
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Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.
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The only real nation is humanity
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I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why.
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I am grateful to Stacy Schiff first of all because she can write a sentence-because she offers us her scholarship with wit, clarity, and grace. Once again, she has done what only the best writers can do: she has made the world new, again.
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... "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.
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Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.
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When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.
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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
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I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.
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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
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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.
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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.
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I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.
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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.
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I tell beginning readers to read a lot and write a lot. If you want to write a book, find a subject that's really worth the time and effort you'll put in.
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In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.
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That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.
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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.
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Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.
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