Top 64 Tracy Kidder Quotes
#1. Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.
Tracy Kidder
#2. It seemed as though Margaret hovered near Alice, aware of Alice when Alice didn't seem to be aware of Margaret.
Tracy Kidder
#3. The last thing I want to do is expend my energy trying to convince my own coworkers.
Tracy Kidder
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. One winter night, at his home, while he was stirring up the logs in his fireplace, he muttered, "Computers are irrelevant." Building
Tracy Kidder
#7. 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
#8. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#9. If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.
Tracy Kidder
#10. What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative.
Tracy Kidder
#11. 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
#12. Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.
Tracy Kidder
#13. When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.
Tracy Kidder
#14. I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.
Tracy Kidder
#15. 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
#17. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#18. 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
#19. I always want to write something better than the last book.
Tracy Kidder
#20. 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
#21. I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows - it's usually hard to read.
Tracy Kidder
#22. I've gotta keep life and computers separate, or else I'm gonna go mad.
Tracy Kidder
#23. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#24. The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression.
Tracy Kidder
#25. I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.
Tracy Kidder
#26. Outside, the afternoon sun was an orange sliver on an icy horizon.
Tracy Kidder
#27. 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
#28. That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.
Tracy Kidder
#29. He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist.
Tracy Kidder
#31. 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
#32. Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.
Tracy Kidder
#33. I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.
Tracy Kidder
#34. 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
#35. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#36. 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
#37. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#38. You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.
Tracy Kidder
#39. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#40. I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why.
Tracy Kidder
#41. People say you can't teach writing, but I think that's nonsense.
Tracy Kidder
#42. Obviously, computers have made differences. They have fostered the development of spaceships- as well as a great increase in junk mail.
Tracy Kidder
#43. When you burn out, you lose enthusiasm. I always loved computers. All of a sudden I just didn't care. It was, all of a sudden, a job.
Tracy Kidder
#44. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#45. As they say, the first step in fixing something is getting it to break.
Tracy Kidder
#46. 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
#47. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#48. god gives but does not share" --haitian proverb
Tracy Kidder
#49. Among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all
Tracy Kidder
#50. 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
#51. If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don't like is bound to happen.
Tracy Kidder
#52. It is not a large exaggeration to say that everything else in a computer exists in order to bring information swiftly to the ALU for manipulation; and for the ALU, adding is the mechanical equivalent of breathing. But
Tracy Kidder
#53. By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success.
Tracy Kidder
#54. Rasala had named the two new prototypes Tartis and Gallifrey, after the home planet and time machine of Dr. Who, the protagonist of a science fiction show on public TV.
Tracy Kidder
#55. Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.
Tracy Kidder
#56. 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.
Tracy Kidder
#57. When I select a topic, it's usually a commitment of two to three years of my life.
Tracy Kidder
#58. In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer's power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, though subtlety went into its design.
Tracy Kidder
#59. The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia.
Tracy Kidder
#60. So many people, he thought, don't listen to the content of what you say but only to the noises you make.
Tracy Kidder
#61. On the contrary, a company was more likely to asphyxiate on its own success.
Tracy Kidder
#62. In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.
Tracy Kidder
#63. I felt vigorous and cheered by borrowed popularity.
Tracy Kidder
#64. 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
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