One chronicler writes of an area of India during the end of the 20th century: Almost no-one in … - Katherine Boo

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To every soul, God will look like its first love because He IS its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it - made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

Katherine Boo

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.

20Th, Lake, Lakes, Trapped, Weed, Writing

Same Author Quotes

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.

Citizens, Legitimate, People, Writing

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

Matter, Mattered, Said

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.

Give, Giving, Jobs, People, Prescriptions, World

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.

Important, Reporting, See, Understanding, World, Written

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

Awe, Stupid, Useless, Writers