Katherine Boo said this quote

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

~ Katherine Boo

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

~ Katherine Boo

Zehrunisa didn’t know Abdul’s age herself. Seventeen was what she’d said before the burning, when people asked her, but he could have been twenty-seven, for all she knew. You didn’t keep track of a child’s years when you were fighting daily to keep him from starving, as she and many other Annawadi mothers had been doing when their teenagers were young.

~ 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