Katherine Boo Quotes
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.
...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.
A great deal of what is presumed to be intractable or inevitable in this world doesn't strike me that way at all.
In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.
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.
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.
I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust them.
.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.
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 polyurethane bags.
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.
Though Abdul had been as afraid of ghosts as most Annawadi boys, these reports did not disturb him. Being terrorized by living people seemed to have diminished his fear of the dead.
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
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.
Much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.
He wanted to go home to the place that he hated.
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.
But something he'd come to realize on the roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned too far, was that a boy's life could still matter to himself.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust him
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust him.
She was simply Asha, a woman on her own. Had the situation been otherwise, she might not have come to know her own brain.