Quotes from Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

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


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About the author

Tracy Kidder
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
Born date November 12, 1945
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Popular quotes

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― James D. Bradley, quote from Flags of Our Fathers


“The entire hospital seemed to go still, watching and waiting, and what the hell was up with Sin and guys on horses anyway? "Well, who is he?"

"War."

Con stared at her. "War. Just...War. What kind of name is that?" Nope, not jealous at all of muscle-bound handsome guy.

"Yeah, you know, the original War. Second Horseman of the Apocalypse?"

Con nearly swallowed his fucking tongue. Everyone else in the ER scrambled backward. Even Eidolon backed up a step as the guy swung down from the horse. Christ, standing, the guy was damned near seven feet tall.

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“Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. And that is what actually happened: both religions encountered a situation in which the will had become diseased, giving rise to a demand that had become utterly desperate for some "thou shalt." Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus they offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing, some delight in willing. For fanaticism is the only "strength of the will" that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant— which the Christian calls his faith. Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes "a believer."

Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will [ This conception of "freedom of the will" ( alias, autonomy) does not involve any belief in what Nietzsche called "the superstition of free will" in section 345 ( alias, the exemption of human actions from an otherwise universal determinism).] that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence.”
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“He didn't understand-how she could be so delicate, so small, when she had overturned his life entirely. Worked miracles with those hands and that soul, this woman who had crossed mountains and seas.”
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“The dark is generous. Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from us the truths of others. The dark protects us from what we dare not know.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Revenge of the Sith


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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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