104 Quotes by 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.

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

.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.

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.

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

She was simply Asha, a woman on her own. Had the situation been otherwise, she might not have come to know her own brain.

Ghosts of women are the worst. Years go by and they don't leave you be

He wanted to go home to the place that he hated.

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.