Tracy Kidder Quotes

You absorb 2,000 years of history just by being near the Thames.

I don't like cartoons that take place in Nowhereville. I like cartoons where I know where they're happening.

History provides a sense of where we've been and lessons that can be taken forward.

You cannot not know history.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

I was to Japanese visitors to Washington what the Mona Lisa is to Americans visiting Paris.

They can see the brave silhouette from almost anywhere in the District of Columbia and use it as a compass to locate other monuments and eventually to find their way out of the great, gray federal wilderness.

If you took a child in London and took their iPhone and took them somewhere else in the country, they'd probably not be able to find their way back. That's a shame.

I was always pretty interested in my history. Not just the history of the Caribbean, the history of my people, but all walks of life.

History lets you know exactly where you are today. And if you pay attention to it, it gives you a broad perspective of everyone. You can relate it to pretty much any time.

I like to know where I am. I don't like the kind of cutting where you don't know where you are.

Once you have looked at the land from atop the Kahlenberg, you will understand what I write and who I am.

For people, 'here' signifies not merely a physical space, but also an historical space.

I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.

It's so important to know where you are.

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

Gish was the best representation of where we were at the time.

It’s history. It’s poetry.

Part of why history is so important in my life is because it brings you an awareness that everything isn't new. It gives context to what's happening right now. History is cyclical but circumstances and technology change. So when social justice topics come up, they're not new. They're just being covered more. We have more ways to record it now.

I think that we need history as much as we need bread or water or love.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.

I love the ordered mind of history because it takes us out of the chaos, momentarily, and says, "Ah, so this is the story we are engaged in."

To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.

We're right here on this very spot. Besides, being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it's a matter of not knowing where you aren't - and I don't care at all about where I'm not.