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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

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Tracy Kidder
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: November 12
Writer
New York City
New York
John Tracy Kidder
Feels
Worthy
Even
Inspire
Thing
Purpose
Life
Happiness
Happy
Makes
Right
Feel

More quotes by Tracy Kidder

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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
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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
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In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.
Tracy Kidder
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If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.
Tracy Kidder
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Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.
Tracy Kidder
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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
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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
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If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don't like is bound to happen
Tracy Kidder
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I am grateful to Stacy Schiff first of all because she can write a sentence-because she offers us her scholarship with wit, clarity, and grace. Once again, she has done what only the best writers can do: she has made the world new, again.
Tracy Kidder
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Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.
Tracy Kidder
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Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.
Tracy Kidder
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The problem is fundamental... It is as if a secret committee, now lost to history, has made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to declared that all of them should do it.
Tracy Kidder
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The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression
Tracy Kidder
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People say you cant teach writing, but I think thats nonsense.
Tracy Kidder
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The only real nation is humanity
Tracy Kidder
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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
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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
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When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.
Tracy Kidder
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My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.
Tracy Kidder
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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