Tracy Kidder > Quotes

“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

“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, Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“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

“[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

“...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, Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“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, Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

“In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.”
― Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

“among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“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, Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“... "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, Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

“So many people, he thought, don't listen to the content of what you say but only to the noises you make.”
― Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

“god gives but does not share" --haitian proverb”
― Tracy Kidder

“It seemed as though Margaret hovered near Alice, aware of Alice when Alice didn't seem to be aware of Margaret.”
― Tracy Kidder, Among Schoolchildren

“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, Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

“ne 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, Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World