A few weeks ago, Abdul had seen a boy’s hand cut clean off when he was putting plastic into one of the shredders. The boy’s eyes had filled with tears, but he hadn’t screamed. Instead, he’d stood there with his blood-spurting stump, his ability to earn a living ended, and started apologizing to the owner of the plant. “SA’ab, I’m sorry,” he’d said to the man in white. “I won’t cause you any problems by reporting this. You will have no trouble from me.

— Katherine Boo

As Abdul and his family had already learned, the police station was not a place where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear. It was a hectic bazaar, like many other public institutions in Mumbai, and investigating Kali’s death was not a profit-generating enterprise.

— Katherine Boo

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

— Katherine Boo

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

— Katherine Boo

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

— Katherine Boo

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.

— Katherine Boo

Food wasn’t one of the amenities at Cooper, the five-hundred-bed hospital on which millions of poor people depended. Nor was medicine. “Out of stock today” was the nurses’ official explanation. Plundered and resold out of supply cabinets was an unofficial one. What patients needed, families had to buy on the street and bring in.

— Katherine Boo

He knew why he and the other children received ice cream only when newspaper photographers came to visit, and why food and clothing donated for the children got furtively resold outside the orphanage gate.

— Katherine Boo

He wanted to go home to the place that he hated.

— Katherine Boo

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.

— Katherine Boo