Quotes by Katherine Boo - Page 1

I'm useless when I meet writers I love - I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Awe
Stupid
Useless
Writers
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...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Matter
Said
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In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Advancement
Break
Country
Mean
Respectable
Tends
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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 / Journalist
Never Trust
People
Said
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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 / Journalist
I Love Him
World
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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 / Journalist
Inevitable
Strikes
Way
World
Great World Me
Deal
Great Deal
Intractable
Strike
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I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Differences
Journalism
Thinking
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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.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Cities
Mumbai
Poor
Rich
Rich People Poor
Places
Tale
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.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Opportunity
Country
Powerful
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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?
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Good Person
Selfish
Good Myself Me
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When your work is nonfiction about low-income communities, pretty much anything that's not nonfiction about low-income communities feels like a guilty pleasure.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Feels
Guilty
Guilty Pleasure
Low Income
Nonfiction
Pleasure
Communities
Pretty Much Anything
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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 / Journalist
Criminals
Guilt
Justice
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I have been dealing with illness and its manifestations since I was a teenager, and I think that gives me a very healthy respect for the things in life we can't control.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Healthy
Illness
Teenager
Life Respect Me
Dealing
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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 / Journalist
Inspiring
Government
Exaggerated
Helping
Nonprofits
Poor
Governments
Help
How Much
Themselves
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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 / Journalist
Medical
Big Deal
Drama
Engaged
Stories
Tied
Work Health Me
Prefer
Dramas
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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 / Journalist
Citizens
People
Writing
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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.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Parent
People
Views
Me People Parents
Caste
Me Parents People
Young People
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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 / Journalist
Moments
Thinking
Want
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Don't correct me, you don't have any rights over me." "What kind of life is this? So I sit at home , entirely dependent on this man, and then it turns out his heart was never with me. How is it possible to force someone to love me?
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Home
Men
Heart
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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 / Journalist
Jobs
Giving
People
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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.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Available
Long
People
Shortcuts
Temptation
Wealth
Naturally
Closer
Comforts
Enjoying
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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 / Journalist
Blow
Children
Vanity
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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?
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Affluence
Cities
Highways
Income
Infrastructure
Talking
Me Important People
Talk
Me People Important
Low
Trains
Surrounding
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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 / Journalist
Fortune
Malaria
People
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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 / Journalist
Conditions
Immense
Merit
People
Way
Abject
Prefer
Clearly
Deciding
Losers
Gets
Gifts
Maybe
Winners
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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 / Journalist
Crazy
Husband
Indian
Majority
Mumbai
Prospects
Residents
Slums
Spending
Wealth
Years
Met
Parts
Reporting
Wondering
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In my kind of reporting work, you don't parachute in after some big, terrible event, which is important and has to be covered, but offers only a glimpse. It's the kind of work in which you ask, what is my understanding of how the world works, and where can I go to see these questions get worked out in individuals' lives? That was really the question for me: whether I had anything to add to what had already been written.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Important
Understanding
World
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When I pick a story, I'm very much aware of the larger issues that it's illuminating. But one of the things that I, as a writer, feel strongly about is that nobody is representative. That's just narrative nonsense. People may be part of a larger story or structure or institution, but they're still people. Making them representative loses sight of that. Which is why a lot of writing about low-income people makes them into saints, perfect in their suffering.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
People
Perfect
Writing
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One chronicler writes of an area of India during the end of the 20th century: Almost no-one in this slum was poor by Indian benchmarks. ... True, a few residents trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner. A few ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake edge. And these individuals, miserable souls, thereby made an inestimable contribution to their neighbors. They gave those slum dwellers who didn't fry rats and eat weeds a sense of their upward mobility.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Lakes
Weed
Writing
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As a reporter, you know the tropes of how stories on poverty work in any country. A reporter will go to an NGO and say, "Tell me about the good work that you're doing and introduce me to the poor people who represent the kind of help you give." It serves to streamline the storytelling, but it gives you a lopsided cosmos in which almost every poor person you read about is involved with a NGO helping him. Our understanding of poverty and how people escape from poverty, in any country, is quite distorted.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Country
Giving
People
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Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way. The attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi, in which executives and socialites died, had served as a blunt correction. The wealthy now saw that their security could not be requisitioned privately. They were dependent on the same public safety system that ill served the poor.
Katherine Boo / Journalist
Cities
School
Years
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Katherine Boo Quotes - Page 1

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