Quotes from Tracy Kidder

En route to California I had a few drinks with an American executive for Falstaff Brewing Company who said he'd been a hobo from '37 to '39. He talked about a friend of his who had lost his legs beneath a freight train and died. He told me he knew something about farm labor contractors. Killers, he called them. And said it again, Killers.

Company engineers helped to design Westborough, and they made it functional and cheap. One contractor who did some work for Data General was quoted in Fortune as saying, "What they call tough auditing, we call thievery.

Giving people medicine for TB and not giving them food is like washing your hands and drying them in the dirt.

Contractors get wealthy in part by subcontracting out large pieces of a job, hiring unskilled labor for one aspect of it and semiskilled labor for another

You did not have to be the first company to produce the new kind of machine; sometimes, in fact, it was better not to be the first. But you had to produce yours before the new market really opened up and customers had made other marriages. For once they are lost, both old and prospective customers are often gone for good.

Some notion of how shrewd they could be is perhaps revealed in the fact that they never tried to hoard a majority of the stock, but used it instead as a tool for growth. Many young entrepreneurs, confusing ownership with control, can't bring themselves to do this.

Charity is scraps from the table, social justice is a seat at the table, and remember, we want a seat.

IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines.

Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive. Minicomputer companies split the differences more or less; they sold some machines and service to actual users, but spent most of their money on hardware and did a big business by selling machines in quantity to OEMs.

EVERY ADULT IS shaped by the experience of childhood and adolescence.

Certain of the engineers now entered what West called "the first off-the-wall period." A few quit. Others went on vacation immediately. Still others spent the next couple of weeks playing a game called Adventure, in which you travel by computer into an underground world, wandering through strange, awful labyrinths, searching for treasure that's guarded and sometimes snatched away by dragons, dwarfs, trolls and a rapacious pirate who mutters: "Har. Har.

Change the world? Of course they could. He really believed this, and he really believed that "a small group of committed individuals" could do it. He liked to say of PIH, "People think we're unrealistic. They don't know we're crazy.

As for the name of the theory behind selling enough stock to become millionaires, Richman told me, "I don't know how you put it in the vernacular. We called it the Fuck You Theory.

Shortly after World War II, decades of investigation into the internal workings of the solids yielded a new piece of electronic hardware called a transistor (for its actual invention, three scientists at Bell Laboratories won the Nobel Prize). Transistors, a family of devices, alter and control the flow of electricity in circuits; one standard rough analogy compares their action to that of faucets controlling the flow of water in pipes.

He recites the names of the trees, vines, shrubs, flowers that he's planted here over the years. I count about forty different species. Finally, in the dim light from the patio, he studies a new fern that has just come up. "It's just vibrant and happy and healthy. The way a patient should be.

We can spend sixty-eight thousand dollars per TB patient in New York City, but if you start giving watches or radios here [Haiti], suddenly the international health community jumps on you for creating 'nonsustainable' projects. If a patient says, I really need a Bible or nail clippers, well, for God's sake!

rare psychiatric malady that actually defines the idea—Cotard's delusion, the belief that one is already dead, or doesn't exist, or is putrefying, or has lost one's blood and inner organs.

Medicine is not efficient," I heard Jim say to a group of interns many years after Taube had retired. "It's not supposed to be efficient. It has nothing to do with efficiency.

Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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