Tracy Kidder

Outside, the afternoon sun was an orange sliver on an icy horizon.

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.

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.

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.

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

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.

... "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.