9 Quotes & Sayings By Tracy Kidder

Tracy Kidder is the author of "The Soul of a New Machine," which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. He is also the author of "Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World," "A Fine Balance: A Memoir of India and America" and "Thunder and Lightning: A Tale of Love and War." He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Esquire, GQ, Mother Jones and many other publications. He lives with his wife, Mary Kidder, in Concord, Massachusetts.

1
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
2
Outside, the afternoon sun was an orange sliver on an icy horizon. Tracy Kidder
3
... "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
4
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
5
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
6
When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it. Tracy Kidder
7
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
8
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