Top 120 Tracy Kidder Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Some problems are easy to find and hard to fix; some are hard to find and easy to fix; some go both ways.”

— Tracy Kidder

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.”

— Tracy Kidder

57. “I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.”

— Tracy Kidder

58. “So many people, he thought, don’t listen to the content of what you say but only to the noises you make.”

— Tracy Kidder

59. “It seemed as though Margaret hovered near Alice, aware of Alice when Alice didn’t seem to be aware of Margaret.”

— Tracy Kidder

60. “I always want to write something better than the last book.”

— Tracy Kidder

61. “I felt vigorous and cheered by borrowed popularity.”

— Tracy Kidder

62. “At age twenty-six, Virchow wrote passionately that terrible social conditions in an impoverished part of Germany called Upper Silesia were the cause of a malaria and dysentery epidemic. His recommendation to the German government: if it wanted to do something about the epidemic, it needed to end the malnutrition, overcrowding, and poor hygiene. Better yet, he added, allow for a full and unlimited democracy in Upper Silesia.”

— Tracy Kidder

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

— Tracy Kidder

64. “When others write about people who live on the edge, who challenge their comfortable lives – and it has happened to me – they usually do it in a way that allows a reader a way out. You could render generosity into pathology, commitment into obsession. That’s all in the repertory of someone who wants to put the reader at ease rather than conveying the truth in a compelling manner.”

— Tracy Kidder

65. “Montaigne blessed the form when he said, “If I knew my own mind, I would not make essays. I would make decisions.”

— Tracy Kidder

66. “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

67. “The last thing I want to do is expend my energy trying to convince my own coworkers.”

— Tracy Kidder

68. “If you’ve got a Mexican last name, you’ve got a strike against you.”

— Tracy Kidder

69. “It became apparent that communications and computing served each other so intimately that they might actually become the same thing;.”

— Tracy Kidder

70. “Among engineers generally, the most common form of ambition – the one made most socially acceptable – has been the desire to become a manager. If you don’t become one by a certain age, then in the eyes of many of your peers you become a failure. Among computer engineers, I think, the wish to manage must be a virtual instinct.”

— Tracy Kidder

71. “Doctors are notorious for taking peculiar views of their own bodies. They tend to develop hypochondria in medical school and, once they get over it, if they do, tend to think they’re invulnerable.”

— Tracy Kidder

72. “How does one person with great talents come to exert a force on the world? I think in Farmer’s case the answer lies somewhere in the apparent craziness, the sheer impracticality, of half of everything he does, including the hike to Casse.”

— Tracy Kidder

73. “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

74. “Because if you’re going to make a small inexpensive computer you have to sell a lot of them to make a lot of money. And we intend to make a lot of money.”

— Tracy Kidder

75. “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

76. “I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn’t have in Vietnam.”

— Tracy Kidder

77. “It was the sort of work that gave meaning to life.”

— Tracy Kidder

78. “I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don’t think I can be clear about exactly why.”

— Tracy Kidder

79. “One shouldn’t expect anyone to be complete at any given moment.”

— Tracy Kidder

80. “Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection. West.”

— Tracy Kidder

81. “Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.”

— Tracy Kidder

82. “Everything is quantified,” he said. “Whether it’s the technology or the way people use it, it has an insidious ability to reduce things to less than human dimensions.”

— Tracy Kidder

83. “I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows – it’s usually hard to read.”

— Tracy Kidder

84. “A great deal has been written on the question of how to motivate industrial workers. Presumably such literature arises because so many jobs have been made so trivial that few people can find any meaning at all in them. It may be that techniques of management alone can’t cure the problem. But clearly, for even the most potentially interesting jobs to be meaningful, there must be managers who are willing to throw away the management handbooks and take some risks.”

— Tracy Kidder

85. “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

86. “When too much is too much or too bad is too bad, we laugh as if it was too good.”

— Tracy Kidder

87. “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

88. “Between Holberger and Veres there exists a kind of technical understanding that outruns the powers of speech. Most Hardy Boys share this specialist’s ESP to some degree. It’s a feeling that some good chess players say they share with worthy opponents, a kind of mind reading – what Holberger calls being “in sync.”

— Tracy Kidder

89. “By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success.”

— Tracy Kidder

90. “There are some things you just do because it’s the right thing to do. And the outcome is out of my hands or in somebody else’s hands. I want to believe there’s value in that. You’re doing everything you can for the patient, but you’re not deluding yourself into thinking that what you do isn’t worth doing because the person is going to die anyway.”

— Tracy Kidder

91. “IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines. They sold their computers to people who were actually going to use them, not to middlemen, and this market required good manners. Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive.”

— Tracy Kidder

92. “Adopting a remote, managerial point of view, you could say that the Eagle project was a case where a local system of management worked as it should: competition for resources creating within a team inside a company an entrepreneurial spirit, which was channeled in the right direction by constraints sent down from the top. But it seems more accurate to say that a group of engineers got excited about building a computer.”

— Tracy Kidder

93. “A great deal has been written on the question of how to motivate industrial workers. Presumably such literature arises because so many jobs have been made so trivial that few people can find any meaning at all in them.”

— Tracy Kidder

94. “Too much protocol.”

— Tracy Kidder

95. “There were Colorgraphics and Summagraphics; Altergo and C. Itoh; and Ball. “Hey, wait a minute. What’s Ball doing here? Aren’t they the mason jar people?” “Yeah, but they also make disk drives.”

— Tracy Kidder

96. “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

97. “Danger made life interesting, but anxiety gets tiring after a while.”

— Tracy Kidder

98. “Infections and Inequalities.”

— Tracy Kidder

99. “Medicine is not efficient,” I heard Jim say to a group of interns many years after Taube had retired. “It’s not supposed to be efficient. It has nothing to do with efficiency.”

— Tracy Kidder

100. “I want a UI that is so simple that drunks can use it and ADDs won’t be distracted away.”

— Tracy Kidder