In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich occasionally rattled, remained class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

— Katherine Boo

In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.

— Katherine Boo

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

— Katherine Boo

It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good.

— Katherine Boo

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust him

— Katherine Boo

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust him.

— Katherine Boo

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

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

— Katherine Boo

Much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.

— Katherine Boo

One of his private vanities was that all the garbage sorting had endowed his hands with killing strength—that he could chop a brick in half like Bruce Lee. “So let’s get a brick,” replied a girl with whom he had once, injudiciously, shared this conviction. Abdul had bumbled away. The brick belief was something he wanted to harbor, not to test.

— Katherine Boo