Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

Like certain faces among the people I see on the street every day, certain words, for some reason, stand out, and leave an impression on me. Others remain in the background, negligible. After ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I dream of writing a book like LOVERS some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Relax," Edith says. "The perfect name will come to you in time." Which is when Gogol announces, "There's no such thing." "No such thing as what?" Astrid says. "There's no such thing as a perfect name. I think that human beings should be allowed to name themselves when they turn eighteen," he adds. "Until then, pronouns. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I've always had this feeling wherever I go. Of not feeling fully part of things, not fully accepted, not fully inside of something. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it would. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Brahmin who'd learned the tribal dialects. He refused ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Learning was an act of rediscovery, knowledge a form of remembering. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

To Travel without moving an inch. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

My wife's name was Mala. The marriage had been arranged by my older brother and his wife. I regarded the proposition with neither objection nor enthusiasm. It was a duty expected of me, as it was expected of every man. She was the daughter of a schoolteacher in Beleghata. I was told that she could cook, knit, embroider, sketch landscapes, and recite poems by Tagore, but these talents could not make up for the fact that she did not possess a fair complexion, and so a string of men had rejected her to her face. She was twenty-seven, an age when her parents had begun to fear that she would never marry, and so they were willing to ship their only child halfway across the world in order to save her from spinsterhood. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Writing down call numbers with short pencils, searching up and down aisles that would turn dark when the timers on the lights expired. She recalls, visually, certain passages in the books she'd read. Which side of the book, where on the page. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

My parents' relationship with Kolkata is so strong. Growing up, the absence of Kolkata was always present in our lives. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war, ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

He especially enjoyed watching Mrs. Sen as she chopped things, seated on newspapers on the living room floor. Instead of a knife she used a blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle in distant seas. The blade was hinged at one end to a narrow wooden base. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

She had denied herself the pleasure of openly sharing life with the person she loved. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

She was unprepared for the landscape to be so altered. For there to be no trace of that evening, forty autumns ago. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, 'Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?' I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Did you have to try for a while?" He thought it a bold question, coming from a stranger. But he was honest with her, his thoughts still loose from the spiked lemonade. "Would you believe, with Maya it happened the first time," he said. He remembered how proud he'd felt, how powerful. The first time in his life he'd had sex without contraception a life had begun. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I was always aware of what the language I was using meant in terms of my bond with my parents - how it defined the lines of affection between us. When I spoke English, I felt I wasn't completely their child any more but the child of another language. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

She prefers books to jewels and saris. She believes as I do. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

There were black mountains on which nothing, no grass or trees, seemed to grow. Thin lines that twisted unpredictably, with tributaries arriving nowhere. Not rivers, but roads. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Depression was a foreign word to them, an American thing. In their opinion their children were immune from the hardships and injustices they had left behind in India, as if the inoculations the pediatrician had given Sudha and Rahul when they were babies guaranteed them an existence free of suffering. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

That year, and every year, it seemed, we began by studying the Revolutionary War. We were taken in school buses on field trips to visit Plymouth Rock, and to walk the Freedom Trail, and to climb to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument. We made dioramas out of colored construction paper depicting George Washington crossing the choppy waters of the Delaware River, and we made puppets of King George wearing white tights and a black bow in his hair. During tests we were given blank maps of the thirteen colonies, and asked to fill in names, dates, capitals. I could do it with my eyes closed. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Even though I now speak the language fairly well, the spoken language doesn't help me. A conversation involves a sort of collaboration and, often, an act of forgiveness. When I speak I can make mistakes, but I'm somehow able to make myself understood. On the page I am alone. The spoken language is a kind of antechamber with respect to the written, which has a stricter, more elusive logic. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I had never traveled alone before and I discovered that I liked it. No one in the world knew where I was, no one had the ability to reach me. It was like being dead, my escape allowing me to taste that tremendous power my mother possessed forever. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Literature is such a profound and deep way to look into someone else's life, his mind, his hopes and thoughts. Books have opened so many doors for me, taking me to places where my normal life and its finite limits could never have. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I realize that it's impossible to know a foreign language perfectly. For ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

You will have a wife, and children of your own, and they will want to be driven to different places at the same time. No matter how kind they are, one day they will complain about visiting your mother, and you will get tired of it too ... You will miss one day, and another, and then she will have to drag herself onto a bus just to get herself a bag of lozenges. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

My father encouraged me to work in the library, just because it was the world that he knew. But I also wanted to do it. I also wanted to work in the library and be part of the library somehow, because it represented a world that really wasn't represented in my home, and I wanted it to be. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Stretched to the breaking point by all that now stood between them, but at the same time refusing to break. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I'm also more exposed. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive. Because words bring back everything: the place, the people, the life, the streets, the life, the sky, the flowers, the sounds. When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. Your breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

You know, since the reviews have come out and people have reacted to it, I've realized that is in a sense what has happened. But as I was writing them, I didn't feel a part of any tradition. I think that would have been too overwhelming, in a sense. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I feel partly American, but I have an ambiguous relation with both America and India, the only two countries I really know. I never feel fully one way or the other. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

It was important to me to become day-to-day fluent and functional in another language, and about 10 years ago, I went to Rome for the first time and felt an instant gut connection and wanted to get to know the city. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

It's easier to surrender to confinement. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Though no longer pregnant, she continues, at times, to mix Rice Krispies and peanuts and onions in a bowl. For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy
a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

My grandfather always says that's what books are for. To travel without moving an inch. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Things were different now, of course; those solitary hours he'd once savored had become a prison for him, a commonplace. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri calls living in a foreign country "an eternal pregnancy"; an uncomfortable wait for something impossible to define. ~ G. Willow Wilson

In the end the boy had died one evening in his mother's arms, his limbs burning with fever, but then there was the funeral to pay for, and the other children who were born soon enough, and the newer, bigger house, and the good schools and tutors, and the fine shoes and the television, and the countless other ways he tried to console his wife and to keep her from crying in her sleep, and so when the doctor offered to pay him twice as much as he earned at the grammar school, he accepted. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

No man wants a woman who dresses like a dishwasher. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I never want to deal with a book once I'm finished writing. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

She wished the days and months ahead of her would end. But the rest of her life continued to present itself, time ceaselessly proliferating. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

That night when I went to the bathroom I only pretended to brush my teeth, for I feared that I would somehow rinse the prayer out as well. I wet the brush and rearranged the tube of paste to prevent my parents from asking any questions, and feel asleep with sugar on my tongue. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

It was very hard for me, for most of my life, to feel American, or call myself American, and that is a very complicated topic that would require a very long conversation. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

American? Indian? I don't know what these words mean. In Italy, it is all about blood, family, where you come from. I'm asked where I am from. I'm from nowhere; I always was, but now I am happy knowing it. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

At 6:30, which was when the national news began, my father raised the volume and adjusted the antennas. Usually I occupied myself with a book, but that night my father insisted that I pay attention. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I think about the structure, sure. I think about what's going to happen, and how it's going to happen, and the pace. But I think if I stop to think about it in an abstract sense, I feel very daunted. I just try to enter into the story and feel my way through it. It's a very murky, intuitive way of going about it. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

In the months before coming to Italy, I was looking for another direction for my writing. I wanted a new approach. I didn't know that the language I had studied slowly for many years in America would, finally, give me the direction. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I think if you speak to any creative person, there's something so powerful - so intoxicating, if you will - about discovering another voice, another instrument, another way of looking at things, another way of perceiving things. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

He looks up at her, and behind her, at the sky, which holds more stars than he ever has seen at one time, crowded together, a mess of dust and gems. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I hope you don't mind my asking," Douglas said, "but I noticed the statue outside, and are you guys Christian? I thought you were Indian. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there's Italian, this strange, other component of me that I've just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

He saw that his mother was dwelling in an alternate time, a more bearable reality. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

He regretted only one thing: that he had not met her sooner, that he had not known her every day of his life. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

He adjusted his body in relation to hers. His head angled down, his hand forming a canopy between them to shield her face from the sun. It was a useless gesture. only silence. The sunlight on her hair ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it's an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I think that I'll think of it very much as the final sort of final moment for this book and put it behind me along with the rest of the book, as I write more books. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

He learned not to mind the silences. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

She believed she was not significant enough to cast a shadow of her own. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

They still feel somehow in transit, still disconnected from their lives, bound up in an alternate schedule, an intimacy only the four of them would share. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

She asked her parents to buy him the books she'd been read by her first teachers, Peter Rabbit and Frog and Toad. "What's the point of buying books for someone who can't read?" her parents asked, legitimately enough, and so she checked them out of her school library and read them to Rahul herself. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Dr. Grant was right, the feeling no longer swallows her. Bela lives on its periphery, she takes it in at a distance. The way her grandmother, sitting on a terrace in Tollygunge, used to spend her days overlooking a lowland, a pair of ponds. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I've gained a lot from James Joyce, Tolstoy, Chekhov and R. K. Narayan. While writing, I try to see if the story is going to radiate spokes. Their literature has always done that and gifted me beautiful things. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died ... He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life ... Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

And yet she could not forgive herself. Even as an adult, she wished only that she could go back and change things: the ungainly things she'd worn, the insecurity she'd felt, all the innocent mistakes she made. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Whenever I can, in my study, on the subway, in bed before going to sleep, I immerse myself in Italian. I enter another land, unexplored, murky. A ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

He remembered himself sitting naked on one side of the mattress, in a room he was suddenly aware he was never again to see. He had not argued; in the wake of his shame, he became strangely efficient and agreeable, with her, with everyone. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Our meals, our actions, were only a shadow of what had already happened there, a lagging ghost of where Mr. Pirzada really belonged. At ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Tour guide tells them that after the Taj was completed, each of the builders, twenty-two thousand men, had his thumbs cut off so that the structure could never be built again. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Without language you can't feel that you have a legitimate, respected presence. You are without a voice, without power. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

A lot of my personality was informed by feeling very different in the world I grew up in, feeling that I didn't fully belong, that my parents didn't belong. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I love Rome. I'm very happy there. I wasn't in New York. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Many of my characters struggle with loneliness, that is fair to say. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

She speaks reverently of her summers here. This is her favorite place in the world, she tells him, and he understands that this landscape, the water of this particular lake in which she first learned to swim, is an essential part of her, even more so than the house in Chelsea. This was where she lost her virginity, she confesses, when she was fourteen years old, in a boathouse, with a boy whose family once summered here. He thinks of himself at fourteen, his life nothing like it is now... He realizes that this is a place that will always be here for her. It makes it easy to imagine her past, and her future, to picture her growing old. He sees her with streaks of gray in her hair, her face still beautiful, her long body slightly widened and slack, sitting on a beach chair with a floppy hat on her head. He sees her returning here, grieving, to bury her parents, teaching her children to swim in the lake, leading them with two hands into the water, showing them how to dive cleanly off the dock. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

The reactions haven't differed; the concerns have been different. When I read for a predominantly Indian audience, there are more questions that are based on issues of identity and representation. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

The Greeks had had no clear notion of it. For them the future had been indeterminable. In Aristotle's teaching, a man could never say for certain if there would be a sea battle tomorrow. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

It's easy to set a story anywhere if you get a good guidebook and get some basic street names, and some descriptions, but, for me, yes, I am indebted to my travels to India for several of the stories. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

At the end of that week, Navin arrived to marry me. I was repulsed by the sight of him, not because I had betrayed him but because he still breathed, because he was there for me and had countless more days to live. And yet without his even realizing it, firmly but without force, Navin pulled me away from you, as the final gust of autumn wind pulls the last leaves from the trees. We were married, we were blessed, my hand was placed on top of his, and the ends of our clothing were knotted together. I felt the weight of each ritual, felt the ground once more underfoot. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I don't want in my life right now. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Be sure to keep my ruby choker and the pearl and emerald set for the person you will marry," she said during one of these walks. "I'm not planning on getting married any time soon," I told her, and she said that she wished she could say the same for dying. Ultimately, I disobeyed her. After she was gone I was unable to open up and examine the contents of all those flat red boxes she'd kept hidden in a suitcase on her closet shelf, never mind set something aside for the sake of my future happiness. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance. To write in a new language, to penetrate its heart, no technology helps. You can't accelerate the process, you can't abbreviate it. The ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

If I stop to think about fans, or best-selling, or not best-selling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It's like staring at the mirror all day. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

With 'Interpreter,' I didn't know it was ever going to be a book, that they were going to be published. I was writing them in a vacuum for the most part. They were my apprentice work. Then the stories happened to become a book. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri