Quote collection
51 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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"
"Writing is revision. All prose responds to work."
"Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else."
"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."
"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."
"How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... 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."
"Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression"
"among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all"
"I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard."
"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"
"When I select a topic, it's usually a commitment of two to three years of my life"
"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."
"Continuity is one of the things I like about New England."
"In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange."
"Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid."
"And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world."