Highlights

People are not poor because they’ve made bad choices, they make bad choices because they’re poor.

. . .

Only in the chatroom did she seem to be in the world, though it was such a bizarre world, filled only with the echoing voices of people who had apparently already agreed with each other.

. . .

It was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case. I thought you needed to think like that to achieve anything in this world.

. . .

Food preparation was not for me, nor was washing, or fetching water or pulling up onions or even feeding the goats and chickens. I was, in the strictest sense of the term, good-for-nothing. Even babies were handed to me ironically, and people laughed when they saw me holding one. Yes, great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They’d met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.

. . .

He didn’t get depressed, but he managed this not by looking away but by looking closely, attending to each logical step in any particular problem, so that the problem itself filled all available mental space.

. . .

No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.

. . .

“I don’t see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don’t see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can’t afford one.”

“Children can be a kind of wealth.”

. . .

Sometimes I wonder if people don’t want freedom as much as they want meaning.

. . .

“Mum, you just said it yourself: you can’t save everybody.”

“That’s true. Very true. But at the same time, can’t you always do more?”

. . .

“Do you think she’s happy?”

“Ah yes - for Americans this is always the most important question.”