Quote

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

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Katherine Boo
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: August 12
Journalist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Crazy
Lived
Prospects
Quite
Husband
Wondering
Wonder
City
Stopped
Years
Couldn
Indian
Make
Wealth
Mets
Prospering
Time
Cities
Spending
Slums
Like
Started
Parts
Residents
Changed
Majority
Reporting

More quotes by Katherine Boo

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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.
Katherine Boo
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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
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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
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I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.
Katherine Boo
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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
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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
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.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.
Katherine Boo
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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
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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
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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