Katherine Boo Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Katherine Boo.
Famous Quotes By Katherine Boo
He personally found the bathing ritual not just pointless but self-deceiving. Getting fresh for a fresh day, in which something new might happen! 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. — Katherine Boo
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 polyurethane bags. — Katherine Boo
In India, a land of few safe assumptions, chronic uncertainty was said to have helped produce a nation of quick-witted, creative problem-solvers. Among — 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
Two boys who looked to be seven years old had been picked up while sweeping floors in a cheap hotel. They reminded Abdul of his little brothers, and he felt emotional being around them. He couldn't see why the state had taken them from their parents. Being so poor that you had to work so young seemed like punishment enough.
Abdul had kept to himself in his first days at Dongri, aware of his inadequacy in the conversational arts, but the incarceration of the seven-year-olds inflamed him. "What's the use, keeping them here?" he blurted out one day. "You see their faces? So much enthusiasm for life, they are going to break the walls of this jail. The government people should let them work, let them be free. — 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
So do I have to teach you all over again how to make the rotis round?" Asha teased her daughter, merrily holding one of them up. "Come on! Who will marry you when you make such ridiculous bread?" The — Katherine Boo
I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences. — 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
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
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust him. — Katherine Boo
Much of her outrage derived from a belated recognition that she was as human as anyone else. — 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
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
Fatima's hair, what was left of it, had pulled free of the coil into which she'd put it before striking the match. Her face was now black and shiny, as if an artist commissioned to lacquer the eyes of a statue of — 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
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
Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, "What a navigator I am!" And then the wind blows you east. — 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
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
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
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
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
Like most scavengers, Sunil knew how he appeared to the people who frequented the airport: shoeless, unclean, pathetic. By winter's end, he had defended against this imagined contempt by developing a rangy, loose-hipped stride for exclusive use on Airport Road. It was the walk of a boy on his way to school, taking his time, eating air. His trash sack was empty on this first leg of his daily route, so it could be tucked under his arm or worn over his shoulders like a superhero cape. When Sister Paulette passed by in her chauffeured white van, it could be draped over his head. Sister Paulette-Toilet was how he thought of her now. He imagined her riding down Airport Road looking for children more promising than he. — 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
Asha grasped many of her own contradictions, among them that you could be proud of having spared your offspring hardship while also resenting them for having been spared. — Katherine Boo
Better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives. While — Katherine Boo
Everyone is Annawadi talks like this- oh, I will make my child a doctor, a lawyer, and he will make us rich. It's vanity, nothing more. Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, "What a navigator I am!" And then the wind blows you east. -ABDUL'S FATHER, KARAM HUSAIN — Katherine Boo
A few weeks ago, Abdul had seen a boy's hand cut clean off when he was putting plastic into one of the shredders. The boy's eyes had filled with tears but he hadn't screamed. Instead he'd stood there with his blood-spurting stump, his ability to earn a living ended, and started apologizing to the owner of the plant. "Sa'ab, I'm sorry," he'd said to the man in white. "I won't cause you any problems by reporting this. You will have no trouble from me. — Katherine Boo
Food wasn't one of the amenities at Cooper, the five-hundred-bed hospital on which millions of poor people depended. Nor was medicine. "Out of stock today" was the nurses' official explanation. Plundered and resold out of supply cabinets was an unofficial one. What patients needed, families had to buy on the street and bring in. — Katherine Boo
Rahul had been underwhelmed by the New Year's rituals of the rich. "Moronic," he had concluded. "Just people drinking and dancing and standing around acting stupid, like people here do every night."
"The hotel people get strange when they drink," he told his friends. "Last night at the end of the party, there was one hero-good-looking, stripes on his suit, expensive cloth. He was drunk, full tight, and he started stuffing bread into his pants pockets, jacket pockets. Then he put more rolls straight into his pants! Rolls fell on the floor and he was crawling under the table to get them. This one waiter was saying the guy must have been hungry, earlier- that whiskey brought back the memory. But when I get rich enough to be a guest at a big hotel, I'm not going to act like such a loser. — Katherine Boo
Water and ice were made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too. — 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
Zehrunisa didn't know Abdul's age herself. Seventeen was what she'd said before the burning, when people asked her, but he could have been twenty-seven, for all she knew. You didn't keep track of a child's years when you were fighting daily to keep him from starving, as she and many other Annawadi mothers had been doing when their teenagers were young. — 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
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
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
In the age of globalization - an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age - hope is not a fiction. — Katherine Boo
An awkward, uneducated boy might still be capable of righteousness: He intended to remember this and every other truth The Master spoke. — Katherine Boo
You think your work is dreaming? — 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
Like most people in the slum, and in the world, for that matter, he believed his own dreams properly aligned to his capacities. — Katherine Boo
A girl could be virtuous without being perfect. Back — Katherine Boo
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 like crazy, I couldn't quite make out how the new wealth had changed the prospects of the majority of city residents who lived in slums. So after a few years I stopped wondering and started reporting. — Katherine Boo
To be poor in Annawadi, or in any Mumbai slum, was to be guilty of one thing or another. — Katherine Boo
Sunil rarely got angry when he discovered the secret reasons behind the ways people behaved. Having a sense of how the world operated, beyond its pretense, seemed to him an armoring thing. — Katherine Boo
She was simply Asha, a woman on her own. Had the situation been otherwise, she might not have come to know her own brain. — Katherine Boo
I hear of this love so often that I think I know it, but I don't feel it, and I myself don't know why,' he fretted. 'These people who love and then the girlfriend goes away - they cut their arms with a blade, they put a cigarette butt out on their hand, they won't sleep, they won't eat, they'll sing - they must have different hearts than mine. — Katherine Boo
Where Old India and New India collide making New India — 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
Avoid trouble. This was the operating principle of Abdul Hakim Husain, an idea so fiercely held that it seemed imprinted on his physical form. — 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
The municipality sent water through six Annawadi faucets for ninety minutes in the morning and ninety minutes at night. Shiv Sena men had appropriated the taps, charging usage fees to their neighbors. These water-brokers were resented, but not as much as the renegade World Vision social worker who had collected money from Annawadians for a new tap, then run away with it. — Katherine Boo
I grew up in a second when my mother died," he told Sunil. "My father and brother didn't understand me. — Katherine Boo
An overweight officer, having delivered a batch of children to the home, started telling one of the guards about his heart problem. "You think you want to be a cop, but you don't, because it kills you," said the officer, mopping his brow. Then he told of another officer with a lung problem, and one who had cancer, and of others who were stress-sick, and of how none of them earned enough to afford decent doctors. Abdul hadn't previously thought of policemen as people with hearts and lungs who worried about money or their health. The world seemed replete with people as bad off as himself, and this made him feel less alone. — Katherine Boo
Abdul's deepest affection was for his two-year-old brother, Lallu, a fact that had begun
to concern him. Listening to Bollywood love songs, he could only conclude that his own
heart had been made too small. He'd never longed with extravagance for a girl, and
while he felt certain he loved his mother, the feeling didn't come in any big gush. But he
could get tearful just looking at Lallu, who was as fearless as Abdul was flinchy. All
those swollen rat bites on his cheeks, on the back of his head. — 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
Ghosts of women are the worst. Years go by and they don't leave you be — Katherine Boo
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 get them closer to the comforts that they see others enjoying, the temptation to take shortcuts can be fierce. — Katherine Boo
Abdul rose with minimal whining, since the only whining his mother tolerated was her own. — Katherine Boo
Because her boils had erupted — Katherine Boo
I'm not squeamish. — Katherine Boo
Much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said. — 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
Becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens. — Katherine Boo
At the heart of her bad nature, like many bad natures, was probably envy. And at the heart of envy was possibly hope - that the good fortune of others might one day be hers — Katherine Boo
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, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what's happening to people who have none. — 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
What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In 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. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace. — Katherine Boo
He felt his mother hadn't prepared him for what it felt like, falling alone. Which — 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
I'm useless when I meet writers I love - I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe. — Katherine Boo
As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education. — 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
But as he'd learned in the police station, being damaged was nothing like being dead. One — 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
Taking his cup, the soldier had stared at her for a long moment and said, 'Don't stand in the sun-- you'll get too dark" (141). — Katherine Boo
The lyrics, in English, were meaningless to him, the bass line irresistible. — Katherine Boo
Everything around us is roses, and we're the shit in between. — Katherine Boo
In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down. — Katherine Boo
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 and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn't hit you, the slumlord you hadn't offended, the malaria you hadn't caught. — Katherine Boo
But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained. As — 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
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
In his first weeks back home, scavenging skills rusty, he took the sandals from the feet of his sleeping father and sold them to Abdul for food. — Katherine Boo
One of his private vanities was that all the garbage sorting had endowed his hands with killing strength - that he could chop a brick in half like Bruce Lee. "So let's get a brick," replied a girl with whom he had once, injudiciously, shared this conviction. Abdul had bumbled away. The brick belief was something he wanted to harbor, not to test. — Katherine Boo
The better I know you, the more I will dislike you, and the more you will dislike me. So let us keep to ourselves. — 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
Escape the situation if you know you're going to be miserable. But I would kill myself by eating poison, not by burning. If you burned yourself, the last memory people would have of you is with your skin all spoiled and scary. — 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
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
In 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. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. — Katherine Boo
And maybe because of the boiling April sun, he thought about water and ice. Water and ice were made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too. He himself was probably a little different from the corrupt people around him. 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. — 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
It made sense to Abdul that in a polyglot city, people would sort themselves as he sorted his garbage, like with like. — 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