104 Quotes by Katherine Boo

The better I know you, the more I will dislike you, and the more you will dislike me. So let us keep to ourselves.

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.

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

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.

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.

When they learned that a family in the slum was making money, they visited every other day to extort some.

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 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.

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