List of Katherine Boo Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

.. Becoming Attached To A Country Involves Pressing, Uncomfortable Questions About Justice And Opportunity For Its Least Powerful Citizens.

I Think It's This Congenital Problem With Journalism That We Oversell The Difference We Make. We Make Small Differences.

A Great Deal Of What Is Presumed To Be Intractable Or Inevitable In This World Doesn't Strike Me That Way At All.

I've Said It Before And I'll Say It Again: Never Trust Anyone Who Tells You How People Come To Trust Them.

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.

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.