Tracy Kidder Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

We want to imagine that we know why characters do what they do and feel as they do. We want to understand characters in a story better than we understand ourselves. This, of course, is an illusion available only in fiction. The writer of factual stories is constrained by what the subject is willing and able to reveal.

Tracy Kidder
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
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.

Tracy Kidder
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
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
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
"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
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
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
For better or worse, education is what happens in these little rooms.

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

Tracy Kidder
I've gotta keep life and computers separate, or else I'm gonna go mad.

Tracy Kidder
The honest nonfiction storyteller is a restrained illusionist.

Tracy Kidder
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
Obviously, computers have made differences. They have fostered the development of spaceships- as well as a great increase in junk mail.

Tracy Kidder
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