Katherine Boo Quotes

17 quotes in 368 categories

• People naturally long for a bit of the wealth that is whorling all around them, and if the work and education available to them won't…
• But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen,…
• My job is to lay it out clearly, not to give my policy prescriptions.Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen,…
• Everyone in Annawadi talks like this: 'Oh, I will make my child a doctor, a lawyer, and he will make us rich'. It's vanity, nothing…
• A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught
• In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.
• Don't correct me, you don't have any rights over me." "What kind of life is this? So I sit at home , entirely dependent on…
• Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices…
• I was spending a lot of time in Mumbai after I met my husband, who is Indian, and while parts of the city were prospering…
• ...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.
• It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents…
• .. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.
• What you don't want is always going to be with you What you want is never going to be with you Where you don't want…
• I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.
• The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of…
• For myself, suffering doesnt make me a good person; it makes me selfish. Why do we think that people who have less should find it…
• We often have an exaggerated sense of what nonprofits and governments are doing to help the poor, but the really inspiring thing is how much…

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