Top 50 Katherine Boo Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Katherine Boo

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

— Katherine Boo

3. “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

4. “Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, “What a navigator I am!” And then the wind blows you east.”

— Katherine Boo

5. “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

6. “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

7. “To be poor in Annawadi, or in any Mumbai slum, was to be guilty of one thing or another.”

— Katherine Boo

8. “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

9. “I’m useless when I meet writers I love – I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe.”

— Katherine Boo

10. “Being terrorized by living people seemed to have diminished his fear of the dead.”

— Katherine Boo

11. “But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.”

— Katherine Boo

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “In the age of globalization – an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age – hope is not a fiction.”

— Katherine Boo

17. “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

18. “Sunil and Abdul sat together more often than before, but when they spoke, it was with the curious formality of people who shared the understanding that much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.”

— Katherine Boo

19. “It made sense to Abdul that in a polyglot city, people would sort themselves as he sorted his garbage, like with like.”

— Katherine Boo

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “But in her current mood, small affronts were bundled with larger disappointments and became a body of evidence.”

— Katherine Boo

24. “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

25. “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

26. “The lyrics, in English, were meaningless to him, the bass line irresistible.”

— Katherine Boo

27. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

28. “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

29. “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

30. “The effect of corruption I find most underacknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility but of our moral universe.”

— Katherine Boo

31. “Though Abdul had been afraid of ghosts as most Annawadi boys, these reports did no disturb him. Being terrorized by living people seemed to have diminished his fear of the dead.”

— Katherine Boo

32. “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

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

— Katherine Boo

34. “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

35. “His general approach toward his neighbors was this: ‘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

36. “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

37. “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.”

— Katherine Boo

38. “In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.”

— Katherine Boo

39. “You think your work is dreaming?”

— Katherine Boo

40. “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

41. “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

42. “Water and ice were made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too.”

— Katherine Boo

43. “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

44. “Much of her outrage derived from a belated recognition that she was as human as anyone else.”

— Katherine Boo

45. “An awkward, uneducated boy might still be capable of righteousness: He intended to remember this and every other truth The Master spoke.”

— Katherine Boo

46. “I grew up in a second when my mother died,” he told Sunil. “My father and brother didn’t understand me.”

— Katherine Boo

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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.”

— Katherine Boo

50. “Abdul could control many of his desires, but not this one. He wanted to be recognized as better than the dirty water in which he lived. He wanted a verdict of ice.”

— Katherine Boo