Katherine Boo Quotes

“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 to go, you have to go
And the moment you think you're going to live more, you're going to die”

— Katherine Boo

“I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.”

— Katherine Boo

“In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of the mutually supportive poor community is demolished. The poor blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.”

— Katherine Boo

He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai's dirty water, he wanted to be ice ... He wanted to be recognized as better than the dirty water in which he lived. He wanted a verdict of ice.

— Katherine Boo

“What, exactly, she had been protesting was subject to interpretation. To the poorest, her self-immolation was a response to enervating poverty. To the disabled, it reflected the lack of respect accorded the physically impaired. To the unhappily married, who were legion, it was a brave indictment of oppressive unions. Almost no one spoke of envy, a stone slab, a poorly made wall, or rubble that had fallen into rice.”

— Katherine Boo

“Author's Note: I wanted to read the book that would begin to answer some of my questions, because I felt I couldn't write it ... I also doubted my ability to handle monsoon and slum conditions after years of lousy health. I made the decision to try in the course of an absurdly long night at home alone in Washington, D.C. Tripping over an unabridged dictionary, I found myself on the floor with a punctured lung and three broken ribs in a spreading pool of Diet Dr Pepper, unable to slither to a phone. In the hours that passed, I arrived at a certain clarity. Having proved myself ill-suited to safe cohabitation with an unabridged dictionary, I had little to lose by pursuing my interests in another quarter
a place beyond my so-called expertise, where the risk of failure would be great but the interactions somewhat more meaningful.”

— Katherine Boo

“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 this man, and then it turns out his heart was never with me. How is it possible to force someone to love me?”

— Katherine Boo

“Though every community is different, my personal rule is pretty much the same: It's O.K. to feel like an idiot going in as long as you don't sound like an idiot coming out.”

— Katherine Boo

“In Delhi, politicians and intellectuals privately bemoaned the "irrationality" of the uneducated Indian masses, but when the government itself provided false answers to its citizens' urgent concerns, rumor and conspiracy took wing. Sometimes, the conspiracies became a consolation for loss.”

— Katherine Boo

Ghosts of women are the worst. Years go by and they don't leave you be

— Katherine Boo

“One thing that was very clear to me is that the young people in a place like Annawadi aren't tripping on caste the way their parents are. They know their parents have these old views.”

— Katherine Boo

“People talk about places like Mumbai as a tale of two cities, as if the rich and poor don't have anything to do with each other.”

— Katherine Boo

“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 edifying?”

— Katherine Boo

“There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who live in our most abject conditions. Maybe there are some things at work in deciding who gets to be society's winners and who gets to be society's losers that don't have to do with merit.”

— Katherine Boo

A great deal of what is presumed to be intractable or inevitable in this world doesn't strike me that way at all.

— Katherine Boo

“I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences.”

— Katherine Boo

“I have been dealing with illness and its manifestations since I was a teenager, and I think that gives me a very healthy respect for the things in life we can't control.”

— Katherine Boo

“When your work is nonfiction about low-income communities, pretty much anything that's not nonfiction about low-income communities feels like a guilty pleasure.”

— Katherine Boo

“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 the poor are doing to help themselves.”

— Katherine Boo

When I'm engaged in a story my health is not a big deal, but when I'm not doing anything, if you sit me down, I can get tied up in my own medical dramas. So I much prefer to work.

— Katherine Boo

“I'm not squeamish.”

— Katherine Boo

“We talk a lot about infrastructure in cities, and it's talking about highways and it's talking about trains, but I think more important to people who are low income is, how do I get from here to there? How do I become part of the affluence that's surrounding me?”

— Katherine Boo

“As Abdul and his family had already learned, the police station was not a place where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear. It was a hectic bazaar, like many other public institutions in Mumbai, and investigating Kalu's death was not a profit-generating enterprise.”

— Katherine Boo

“Water and ice made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too ...
If he had sort all the humanity by its material essence, he thought he would probably end up with a single gigantic pile. But here was the interesting thing. Ice was distinct from - and in his view, better than - what it was made of.
He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai's dirty water, he wanted to be ice. He wanted to have ideals. For self-interested reasons, one of the ideals he most wanted to have was a belief in the possibility of justice.”

— Katherine Boo

“No one knows, but don't worry," Zehrunisa said. "Just leave everything to God and keep praying. Now we have a lawyer who will say the right words, and then it will end, because the judge will pick up the truth."
"Pick up the truth," he repeated skeptically. As if truth were a coin on a footpath. He changed the subject.”

— Katherine Boo

Every month that passed, he felt less sure of where he belonged among the human traffic in the city below. Once he had believed he was smart and might become something - not a big something, like the people who frequented the airport, but a middle something. Being on the roof, even if he had come up to steal things, was a way of not being what he had become in Annawadi.

— Katherine Boo

“Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father.”

— Katherine Boo

“In America and Europe, it was said, people know what is going to happen when they turn on the water tap or flick on the light switch. In India, a land of few safe assumptions, chronic uncertainty was said to have helped produce a nation of quick-witted, creative problem-solvers.”

— Katherine Boo

“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 had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way.
The attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi, in which executives and socialites died, had served as a blunt correction. The wealthy now saw that their security could not be requisitioned privately. They were dependent on the same public safety system that ill served the poor.”

— Katherine Boo

“Where Old India and New India collide making New India”

— Katherine Boo

“If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?”

— Katherine Boo

“Abdul knew this Gandhi as the one who cared for poor people, who liked Muslims as well as Hindus, who took on the British and made India free.”

— Katherine Boo

“He thought it better to start the day by acknowledging that it was going to be just as dull as the days preceding it. That way, you wouldn't be disappointed. Abdul”

— Katherine Boo

Still, Kasab seemed lucky to Abdul. "They will probably beat him lots in the jail," Abdul said one day, "but at least Kasab knows in his heart that he did what they said he did." That had to be less stressful than being beaten when you were innocent. The

— Katherine Boo

“While independent India had been founded by high-born, well-educated men, by the twenty-first century few such types stood for elections, or voted in them, since the wealthy had extra-democratic means of securing their social and economic interests. Across India, poor people were the ones who took the vote seriously. It was the only real power they had. Another”

— Katherine Boo

“He knew why he and the other children received ice cream only when newspaper photographers came to visit, and why food and clothing donated for the children got furtively resold outside the orphanage gate.”

— Katherine Boo

“Like most young Annawadians, the girls considered the caste obsession of their elders to be an irrelevant artifact. Manju and Meena had become friends because they both loved to dance, and stayed friends because they could keep each other's secrets.”

— Katherine Boo

“The forces of justice had finally come to Annawadi. That the beneficiaries were horses was a source of bemusement to Sunil and the road boys.”

— Katherine Boo

“Only in the hours when the men came - husband at work, daughters at school - did the part of her body she had to offer feel more important than the part of it she lacked.”

— Katherine Boo

It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good.

— Katherine Boo

“Because her boils had erupted”

— Katherine Boo

“The astonishing thing is that some people are good, and that many others try to be.”

— Katherine Boo

“Besides, this was the gentle-going hour in which he hated Annawadi least. The pale sun lent the sewage lake a sparkling silver cast, and the parrots nesting at the far side of the lake could still be heard over the jets.”

— Katherine Boo

“Everything on television announced a new and better India for women. Her favorite Tamil soap opera was about an educated single girl who worked in an office. In her favorite commercials, a South Indian movie siren named Asin was recommending, along with Mirinda orange soda, more fun, a little wildness. This new India of feisty, convention-defying women wasn't a place Meena knew how to get to.”

— Katherine Boo

“Asha believed a person seeking betterment should try as many schemes as possible, since it was hard to predict which one might work.”

— Katherine Boo

He wanted to go home to the place that he hated.

— Katherine Boo

“To Annawadians, a difficult-to-raze house increased the odds that a family's tenure on airport land would be acknowledged by the relocation authorities. And so they put their money into what would be destroyed.”

— Katherine Boo

The age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional.

— Katherine Boo

“She had seen behind the obvious truth
that Mumbai was a hive of hope and ambition
to a profitable corollary. Mumbai was a place of festering grievance and ambient envy. Was there a soul in this enriching, unequal city who didn't blame his dissatisfaction on someone else?”

— Katherine Boo

“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, I don't want to live in that world.”

— Katherine Boo