Katherine Boo famous quotes

07-08-2025

I'm useless when I meet writers I love - I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe.
-- Katherine Boo

#Stupid #Useless #Awe
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 donâ€™t want to live in that world.
-- Katherine Boo

#Writing #People #Citizens
...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.
-- Katherine Boo

#Matter #Said
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

#Long #People #Temptation
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

#School #Government #Years
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

#Husband #Crazy #Years
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

#Government #Nonprofits #Helping
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

#World #Way #Strikes
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

#Drama #Stories #Medical
I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences.
-- Katherine Boo

#Thinking #Differences #Journalism
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

#Views #People #Parent
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

#Home #Heart #Men
In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.
-- Katherine Boo

#Country #Mean #Advancement
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 hadnâ€™t hit you, the slumlord you hadnâ€™t offended, the malaria you hadnâ€™t caught.
-- Katherine Boo

#People #Malaria #Caught
.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.
-- Katherine Boo

#Country #Powerful #Opportunity
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

#Thinking #Want #Moments
I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.
-- Katherine Boo

#I Love Him #World
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

#Justice #Guilt #Garbage
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 whatâ€™s happening to people who have none.
-- Katherine Boo

#Jobs #People #Giving
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 more. Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, 'what a navigator I am!' And then the wind blows you east.
-- Katherine Boo

#Children #Blow #Vanity
A decent life was the train that hadnâ€™t hit you, the slumlord you hadnâ€™t offended, the malaria you hadnâ€™t caught
-- Katherine Boo

#Malaria #Caught #Decent
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

#People #Way #Merit

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