Katherine Boo

“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.”

“I'm useless when I meet writers I love - I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe.”

“I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.”

“A great deal of what is presumed to be intractable or inevitable in this world doesn't strike me that way at all.”

“In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of the mutually supportive poor community is demolished. The poor blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.”

“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.”

“Water and ice made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too...If he had sort all the humanity by its material essence, he thought he would probably end up with a single gigantic pile. But here was the interesting thing. Ice was distinct from - and in his view, better than - what it was made of.He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai's dirty water, he wanted to be ice. He wanted to have ideals. For self-interested reasons, one of the ideals he most wanted to have was a belief in the possibility of justice.”

“Like most young Annawadians, the girls considered the caste obsession of their elders to be an irrelevant artifact. Manju and Meena had become friends because they both loved to dance, and stayed friends because they could keep each other’s secrets.”

“The forces of justice had finally come to Annawadi. That the beneficiaries were horses was a source of bemusement to Sunil and the road boys.”

“In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.”

“The municipality sent water through six Annawadi faucets for ninety minutes in the morning and ninety minutes at night. Shiv Sena men had appropriated the taps, charging usage fees to their neighbors. These water-brokers were resented, but not as much as the renegade World Vision social worker who had collected money from Annawadians for a new tap, then run away with it.”

“As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education.”

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

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