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Top Tracy Kidder Quotes

Browse top 33 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Tracy Kidder.

Favorite Tracy Kidder Quotes

1. "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." ~ Tracy Kidder
2. "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." ~ Tracy Kidder
3. "among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all" ~ Tracy Kidder
4. "That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people." ~ Tracy Kidder
5. "The goofiness of radicals thinking they have to dress in Guatemalan peasant clothes. The poor don't want you to look like them. They want you to dress in a suit and go get them food and water. Comma." ~ Tracy Kidder
6. "...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself." ~ Tracy Kidder
7. "In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange." ~ Tracy Kidder
8. "Paul's face grew serious. 'I think whenever a people has enormous resources, it is easy for them to call themselves democratic. I think of myself more as a physician than an American. We belong to the nation of those who care for the sick. Americans are lazy democrats, and it is my belief, as someone who shares the same nationality as [a Russian doctor], I think the rich can always call themselves democratic, but the sick people are not among the rich [...] I'm very proud to be an American. I have many opportunities because I'm American. I can travel freely through the world, I can start projects, but that's called privilege, not democracy." ~ Tracy Kidder
9. "[Farmer] went to dozens of American and Canadian universities and colleges, preaching his O for the P [Preferential Option for the Poor] gospel, and to South Africa, where he debated a World Bank official at an international AIDS conference. "Africans must learn to curb their sexual appetites," the banker remarked, and Farmer replied, "I want to talk about other bankers, not the World Bankers, but bankers in general. My suspicion is they're not getting a lot of sex, because they spend a lot of time screwing the poor." ~ Tracy Kidder
10. "So many people, he thought, don't listen to the content of what you say but only to the noises you make." ~ Tracy Kidder
11. "I think Farmer taps into a universal anxiety and also into a fundamental place in some troubled consciences, into what he calls "ambivalence," the often unacknowledged uneasiness that some of the fortunate feel about their place in the world, the thing he once told me he designed his life to avoid." ~ Tracy Kidder
12. "The view reminded of the Haitain proverb "Beyond mountains there are mountains" which meant that when you'd solved one problem, you couldn't rest because you had to go on and solve the next." ~ Tracy Kidder
13. "He sniffed, and said as others had before him and others no doubt would again, "I have learned never to say, 'Never again." ~ Tracy Kidder
14. "One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase "looking for life, destroying life," Then he explained, "It's an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies." I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world's errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the "erasing" of people, the "hiding away" of suffering. "My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember." ~ Tracy Kidder
15. "god gives but does not share" --haitian proverb" ~ Tracy Kidder
16. "In the process Paul laid out a comprehensive theory of poverty, of a world designed by the elites of all nations to serve their own ends, the pieces of the design enshrined in ideologies, which erased the histories of how things came to be as they were." ~ Tracy Kidder
17. "How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist." ~ Tracy Kidder
18. "Outside, the afternoon sun was an orange sliver on an icy horizon." ~ Tracy Kidder
19. "... "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming." ~ Tracy Kidder
20. "Continuity is one of the things I like about New England." ~ Tracy Kidder
21. "I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why." ~ Tracy Kidder
22. "I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows - it's usually hard to read." ~ Tracy Kidder
23. "I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass." ~ Tracy Kidder
24. "Children get dealt grossly unequal hands, but that is all the more reason to treat them equally in school, Chris thought. "I think the cruelest form of prejudice is... if I ever said, 'Clarence is poor, so I'll expect less of him than Alice.' Maybe he won't do what Alice does. But I want his best." She knew that precept wasn't as simple as it sounded. Treating children equally often means treating them very differently. But it also means bringing the same moral force to bear on all of them, saying, in effect, to Clarence that you matter as much as Alice and won't get away with not working, and to Alice that you won't be allowed to stay where you are either." ~ Tracy Kidder
25. "If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you." ~ Tracy Kidder
26. "If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don't like is bound to happen." ~ Tracy Kidder
27. "In a very basic way, a prominent landmark such as Mt. Holyoke tells you where you are. They let you know that you're not the first person in a place." ~ Tracy Kidder
28. "When I select a topic, it's usually a commitment of two to three years of my life." ~ Tracy Kidder
29. "I never planned on doing a book about Paul Farmer or his organization. I met him in Haiti when I was on a magazine assignment. It's almost like his story sort of fell in my lap." ~ Tracy Kidder
30. "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." ~ Tracy Kidder
31. "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." ~ Tracy Kidder
32. "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." ~ Tracy Kidder
33. "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." ~ Tracy Kidder

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Today's Quote

The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence."
Author: Charles Caleb Colton

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Ought
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