181 Quotes by 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.

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.

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

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

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.

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.

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

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.