I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why..

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 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,….

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 translat….

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

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..

I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season..

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 ….

What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives.

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….

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..

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid..

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved..

...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself..

What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange..

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass..

That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people..

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work..

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 g….