Katherine Boo People Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust them.

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.

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.