Tracy Kidder · 277 pages
Rating: (13.5K votes)
“... "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, quote from 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, quote from Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness
“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, quote from 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, quote from Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness
“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, quote from Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness
“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, quote from Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness
“One shouldn't expect anyone to be complete at any given moment.”
― Tracy Kidder, quote from Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness
“I stared at the faces of the dead students. “You know, Zacharie, just looking at them, I can’t tell you which ones were Tutsis, which Hutus.” “Exactly!” said Deo in a loud whisper. Evidently, one was supposed to whisper here. “And neither could the killers!” “The killers couldn’t see the difference, too,” whispered Zacharie. “So they ask. Because they can’t tell. We are the same people.”
― Tracy Kidder, quote from Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness
“When too much is too much or too bad is too bad, we laugh as if it was too good.”
― Tracy Kidder, quote from Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness
Tracy Kidder
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
Born date November 12, 1945
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“People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Clash of Kings
“I REMEMBER the day the Aleut ship came to our island. At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea. Then it grew larger and was a gull with folded wings. At last in the rising sun it became what it really was—a red ship with two red sails. My brother and I had gone to the head of a canyon that winds down to a little harbor which is called Coral Cove. We had gone to gather roots that grow there in the spring. My brother Ramo was only a little boy half my age, which was twelve. He was small for one who had lived so many suns and moons, but quick as a cricket. Also foolish as a cricket when he was excited. For this reason and because I wanted him to help me gather roots and not go running off, I said nothing about the shell I saw or the gull with folded wings. I went on digging in the brush with my pointed stick as though nothing at all were happening on the sea. Even when I knew for sure that the gull was a ship with two red sails. But Ramo’s eyes missed little in the world. They were black like a lizard’s and very large and, like the eyes of a lizard, could sometimes look sleepy. This was the time when they saw the most. This was the way they looked now. They were half-closed, like those of a lizard lying on a rock about to flick out its tongue to catch a fly. “The sea is smooth,” Ramo said. “It is a flat stone without any scratches.” My brother liked to pretend that one thing was another. “The sea is not a stone without scratches,” I said. “It is water and no waves.” “To me it is a blue stone,” he said. “And far away on the edge of it is a small cloud which sits on the stone.” “Clouds do not sit on stones. On blue ones or black ones or any kind of stones.” “This one does.” “Not on the sea,” I said. “Dolphins sit there, and gulls, and cormorants, and otter, and whales too, but not clouds.” “It is a whale, maybe.” Ramo was standing on one foot and then the other, watching the ship coming, which he did not know was a ship because he had never seen one. I had never seen one either, but I knew how they looked because I had been told. “While you gaze at the sea,” I said, “I dig roots. And it is I who will eat them and you who will not.” Ramo began to punch at the earth with his stick, but as the ship came closer, its sails showing red through the morning mist, he kept watching it, acting all the time as if he were not. “Have you ever seen a red whale?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, though I never had. “Those I have seen are gray.” “You are very young and have not seen everything that swims in the world.” Ramo picked up a root and was about to drop it into the basket. Suddenly his mouth opened wide and then closed again. “A canoe!” he cried. “A great one, bigger than all of our canoes together. And red!” A canoe or a ship, it did not matter to Ramo. In the very next breath he tossed the root in the air and was gone, crashing through the brush, shouting as he went. I kept on gathering roots, but my hands trembled as I dug in the earth, for I was more excited than my brother. I knew that it was a ship there on the”
― Scott O'Dell, quote from Island of the Blue Dolphins
“A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from Stranger in a Strange Land
“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from For Whom the Bell Tolls
“I keep forgetting that rules are only for little nice people.”
― Bill Watterson, quote from The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
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