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.
Tracy KidderYou 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 KidderAt 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 KidderThat's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.
Tracy KidderMany 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 KidderI 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.
Tracy KidderHow 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.
Tracy Kidder