Life & Wisdom Quote by Tracy Kidder

Continuity is a slyly radical preference to admit in a culture trained to fetishize disruption. Kidder’s line sounds like a mild compliment to New England, but it carries a sharper judgment about what Americans are asked to admire: speed, novelty, reinvention. New England, in the national imagination, is the counterprogram - town greens, old cemeteries, institutions that predate your grandparents, a public life organized around habit and weather. Saying he “likes” continuity isn’t just regional affection; it’s a declaration that stability can be a moral and aesthetic value, not a failure of ambition.

Kidder’s work has long been interested in systems and the people living inside them - hospitals, classrooms, small towns - and continuity is what makes those systems legible. It’s the difference between a place you can read over time and a place that’s constantly being rewritten by development, migration, and market churn. The subtext is almost journalistic: continuity is data. It lets you notice what changes, who benefits, who gets displaced, what stories persist.

There’s also a quiet class and power angle. Continuity often belongs to people who can afford for a place to remain itself. The same traditions that comfort residents can lock out newcomers or preserve inequities under the banner of “character.” Kidder’s sentence works because it’s both tender and provocative: an endorsement of rootedness that dares the reader to ask what, exactly, is being kept continuous - and at whose expense.