Tracy Kidder Quotes

When I look back at it now, my past and the way I grew up, I grew up on communes.

I haven't lived in Sweden since I was a teenager. We lived in southern Sweden, about two hours north of Copenhagen, where my family's home base has been since 1970. Our parents bought a schoolhouse in preparation for self-sufficient living. They wanted to create a place to do all the things they believed in.

I've lived a slower and less expensive life going off the grid, and I'm happier because of it.

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

There's something great about the idea of working the land and living communally. That's healthy. That's good.

People are being overwhelmed with social issues, political problems and economic problems - and this notion of giving everything up and going to live off-grid and to have a simpler way of life is quite attractive.

A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.

You cannot build nonviolence on a factory civilization, but it can be built on self-contained villages.

The kibbutz way of life is not for everyone. It is meant for people who are not in the business of working harder than they should be working, in order to make more money than they need, in order to buy things they don't really want, in order to impress people they don't really like.

It would be nice to live off the land and fix cars.

Others are keen to see if natives other than us live better than we do, without heat in pipes, ice in boxes, sunshine in bulbs, music on disks, or images gliding over a pale screen.

I'd like to live off-grid.

My goal involves a hammock, a vegetable patch, and a solar-powered house. And I hope to eventually get there.

I was a home-schooled kid, living in the forest, and I didn't even have cable. I'm serious.

In Japan, I live in a little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. I don't have a bicycle or a car or anything, so my only movement is within the boundaries of my feet. I feel there's a need for that kind of conscientious objection to the momentum of the world.

I'm trying to assemble materials for a different mode of life.

When I was a student in the '60s, I dreamt of making a house 7 feet by 7 feet, as a dream of freedom, of self-moderation.

It was a matter of not living lavishly but enjoying what you had, growing things with your hands, working hard, but not being tied to a nine-to-five job, and generally feeling that there's more to life than money.

I actually believe in simplicity as a way of life. My wife and I are considering moving into a yurt!

I'm focusing on cultivating my land. I have vegetables and fruit trees; I want to get some chickens and solar and really get off the grid and focus on just, really, being a mother.

I know people who have, until recently, lived with dirt floors. There are people who live way back off the grid, without electricity. Not a whole lot, but quite a few. That's a choice for a lot of them. There might be a religious element in their isolation, at least with some of them.

I always prided myself on the fact that I could live out of milk crates forever. It was kind of my way of detaching from materialism.

I think people are looking for an alternative to the fast pace of everyday life and entertainment.

I had a free-range childhood. We lived in town but with a cow, chooks, bees, and multiple veggie gardens so we could live self-sufficiently.

I live my life very Amish-like. Other than video games, I don't think I have a reason for electronics. It's a life that I've always loved.