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Car horns, shrill and prolonged, blared one after another. Flashing sirens heralded endless emergencies, and a fleet of buses rumbled past, their doors opening and closing with a powerful hiss, throughout the night. The noise was constantly distracting, at times suffocating. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
My reasons for coming to get married in Calcutta are complicated, and it's very hard to put it into a sentence. People ask me why. To me, it just felt like a very natural and exciting decision. -- 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
I never want to deal with a book once I'm finished writing. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
A woman who had fallen out of love with her life -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
As strange as it seemed, I knew in my heart that one day her death would affect me, and stranger still, that mine would affect her. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the word for yesterday, kal, was also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali one needed an adjective, or relied on the tense of a verb, to distinguish what had already happened from what would be. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Amid the gray, an incongruous band of daytime blue asserts itself. To the west, a pink sun already begins its descent. The effect is of three isolated aspects, distinct phases of the day. All of it, strewn across the horizon, is contained in his vision. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it, and I will continue to write about it. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Writing is so humbling; there's no confidence involved. -- 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
Brahmin who'd learned the tribal dialects. He refused -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Because in the end to learn a language, to feel connected to it, you have to have a dialogue, however childlike, however imperfect. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
She felt the lurch of a head rush. The boy who had not paid attention to her; the man who'd embarked on an affair knowing she could never be his; at the last moment he was asking for more. A piece of her was elated. But she was also struck by his selfishness. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I think it's the small things, the smaller episodes and details that I linger on and try to draw meaning from, just personally. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I don't know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in my parents' marriage. And it's interesting to be married yourself, too, because there is an inevitable comparison. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
This story is based on a gentleman who indeed did ... used to come to my parents' house in 1971 from Bangladesh. He was at the University of Rhode Island. And I was four, four years old, at the time, and so I actually don't have any memories of this gentleman. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I had been learning Italian for years. I always loved Latin, but Italian is a living language; I'm writing in it now as well as reading it. It is so interesting delving further into language. -- 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
She returned to Boston in April, during the break after the Lent term, a diamond ring from Roger concealed on a chain beneath her sweater, and this made her feel dipped in a protective coating from her family. -- 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
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
One week after moving to Rome, I started writing in my diary in Italian. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Again, as it was after Udayan's death, there was an acute awareness of time, of the future looming, accelerating. The baby's lifetime, so scant, already outdistancing and outpacing her own. This was the logic of parenthood. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
There was the focus of seeking pleasure, and the numbing effect, once they were finished, removing all specific thoughts from her brain. It ushered in the solid, dreamless sleep that otherwise eluded her. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I love stories. But I don't distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story, I'm seeking the same thing: I'm seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words. -- 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
It had ended bitterly; though at the time he could never come up with a reason not to, he could not bring himself to propose. She had not taken hold of him; he could see now that that was the problem. And so he left the tears and fury in Milan and took the train down to Rome. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
When Deepa poured Bela some water from the urn that stood on a little stool, in the corner of the room, her grandmother reproached her.
Not that water. Give her the boiled water. She's not made to survive here. -- 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
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 nickname had irritated and pleased her at the same time. It made her feel foolish, but she was aware that in renaming her he had claimed her somehow, already made her his own. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
In their silence they continued both to protect me and to punish me. The memory of that night was now the only tie between us, eclipsing everything else. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
If their mother complained that he hadn't brought back enough, he'd say, Better to eat a small piece of fish with flavor than a large one without. He'd witnessed a famine of devastating proportions, never taking a single meal for granted. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I owed the greater apology, but at the same time I knew that was done was done, that no matter what I said now I would never be able to make it right. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
It's a sort of literary act of survival. I don't have many words to express myself
rather, the opposite. I'm aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I'm scared that the pencil sides might disappear, just as a drawing can be rubbed out by an eraser. Bengali will be taken away when my parents are no longer there. It's a language that they personify, that they embody. When they die, it will no longer be fundamental to my life. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn't matter what you've done before. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive. -- 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
I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Sexy means loving someone you do not know. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The view induces the opposite of vertigo, a lurching feeling inspired not by gravity's pull to earth, but by the infinite reaches of heaven. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
That in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I'm from Kingston, R.I., sort of on the University of Rhode Island campus - on the margins of that, actually. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The years the couple have together are a shared conclusion to lives separately built, separately lived. There is no use wondering what might have happened if the man had met her in his forties, or in his twenties. He would not have married her then. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I have very little choice. If I don't write, I feel dreadful. So I write. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
And yet it felt like an invasion of the part of his body, the physical sense that was most precious: something that betrayed him and also refused to abandon him. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life, only to strip it bare. Only to be alone in the end. Her life had been paired down to its solitary components. -- 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
On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of unfamiliar trees into which East Pakistani refugees had fled, seeking safety over the Indian border. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
You can't have a hit every time. The main thing is to keep on working and not be afraid to take risks. It's better to do something that's not perfect and successful every time. It's important to be fearless and move forward, to learn from what went wrong. -- 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
They found a thick tree that had fallen, the tangled roots exposed. They saw the drenched ground that had given way. The tree seemed more overwhelming when it lay on the ground. Its proportions frightening, once it no longer lived. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past. -- 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
Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever ... this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.' All the details get watered down but don't quite disappear. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The camera slung around his neck ... was the only complicated thing he wore. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it would. -- 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
I write to feel alone. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
It was only then, raising my water glass in his name, that I knew what it meant to miss someone who was so many miles and hours away, just as he had missed his wife and daughters for so many months. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
If you grow up in a place, and you're small, even if the place is itself also small, it's huge to you. It's what's out there: it's the world outside of your door. -- 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
And yet I know that expressing oneself necessarily means being different. The writer's voice is a singular one, solitary. Art is nothing other than the freedom to express oneself in any language, in whatever manner, dressed any which way. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I'm the least-experimental writer. The idea of trying things just for the sake of pushing the envelope, that's never really interested me. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
But no turbulent emotions passed through me as he spoke, only a diluted version of the nauseating sensation that had taken hold the day in Bombay that I learned my mother was dying, a sensation that had dropped anchor in me and never fully left. -- 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
station on Cape Cod looks close to where you are. It's in a place called Wellfleet. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I've always been searching to arrive at a certain voice that will probably elude me forever. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Sometimes, so much of the difficulty is the question of 'What am I going to write about?' because the world is so vast. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
No man wants a woman who dresses like a dishwasher. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you. -- 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
To Travel without moving an inch. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Books seem so much more - much more sacred to me, and more important and essential, than they were when I was young. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
asked Paul to help him put it out on the -- Jhumpa Lahiri
With her own hand she'd painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether. -- 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
...American book jackets reflect the spirit of country - little homogeneity, lots of diversity. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Then again, how could he expect Bela to be interested in marriage, given the example he and Gauri had given? They were a family of solitaries. They had collided and dispersed. This was her legacy. If nothing else, she had inherited that impulse from them. -- 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
She wanted to shut her eyes to it. She wished the days and months ahead of her would end. But the rest of her life continued to present itself, time ceaselessly proliferating. She was made to anticipate it against her will. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
At four Bela was developing a memory. The word yesterday entered her vocabulary, though its meaning was elastic, synonymous with whatever was no longer the case. The past collapsed, in no particular order, contained by a single word. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I tend to read mostly 20th-century fiction, 20th-, 21st-century fiction in Italian. -- 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
She prefers books to jewels and saris. She believes as I do. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again. The -- 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
On the technical side, I hope that my writing is evolving and maturing, ripening, deepening. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he'd landed and made his life, was not his, -- Jhumpa Lahiri
How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn't mine? That I don't know? Maybe because I'm a writer who doesn't belong completely to any language. -- 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
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
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
The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The imperfection became a mark of distinction about their home. Something visitors noticed, the first family anecdote that was told. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
They don't understand why I want to take such a risk. These reactions don't surprise me. A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening. -- 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
And she refused to go to that miserable place he had dragged her to so many times, to hope for a thing that was unchangeable. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
His favorite moments were when he was alone, or felt alone. Lying in bed in the morning, watching sunlight flickering like a restless bird on the wall. He -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I started writing after college, slowly, secretly writing. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I have my husband and children near me in Rome, and I feel this is where we are temporarily belonging. But personally, all my life, I have felt the absence of a sense of history. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The effort flops like a just-caught fish inside her. A brief burst of possibility as the name is typed onto the screen, as she clicks to activate the search. Hope thrashing in the process of turning cold. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. -- 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
Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
What she'd done for him, because he'd asked. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I'm bound to fail when I write in Italian, but unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn't torment or grieve me. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Certain creatures laid eggs that were able to endure the dry season. Others survived by burying themselves in mud, simulating death, waiting for the return of rain. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
She knew that the word providence meant foresight, the future beheld before it was experienced. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I love Rome. I'm very happy there. I wasn't in New York. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
It made him shy, they way he felt the first time they stood together in a mirror. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I'm also more exposed. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
It is the goddess Kali," Mrs. Dixit explained brightly, -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting. -- 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
Relationships do not preclude issues of morality. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold. Blindly planning for it, envisioning things that weren't the case. This was the working of the will. This was what gave the world purpose and direction. Not what was there but what was not. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. But usually it's tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian -- Jhumpa Lahiri
She is stunned that in this town there are no sidewalks to speak of, no streetlights, no public transportation, no stores for miles at at a time. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
In those six weeks I regarded her arrival as I would the arrival of a coming month, or season - something inevitable, but meaningless at the same time. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Stretched to the breaking point by all that now stood between them, but at the same time refusing to break. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before -- 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
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
She supposed that all those years of loving a person who was dishonest had taught her a few things. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
You remind me of everything that followed. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Only then, forced at six months to confront his destiny, does he begin to cry. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters - it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too soon and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
She had listened to him, partly sympathetic, partly horrified. For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family's heritage, another to hear it from him. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
People are starving, and this is their solution, he eventually said. They turn victims into criminals. They aim guns at people who can't shoot back. -- 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
By now she has learned that her husband likes his food on the salty side, that his favorite thing about lamb curry is the potatoes, and that he likes to finish his dinner with a small final helping of rice and dal. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still. -- 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
That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
He has no ABCD friends at college. He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
She watched his lips forming the words, at the same time she heard them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The blood of too many, dissolving the very stain. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
They were all like siblings, Mr. Kapasi thought as they passed a row of date trees. Mr. and Mrs. Das behaved like an older brother and sister, not parents. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Many of my characters struggle with loneliness, that is fair to say. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
In Bengali class, Gogol is taught to read and write his ancestral alphabet, which begins at the back of his throat with an unaspirated K and marches steadily across the roof of his mouth, ending with elusive vowels that hover outside his lips -- Jhumpa Lahiri
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
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
There had been nothing worse than waiting for it to come; the void that followed was easier to bear than the solid weight of those days. -- 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
Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
No more bells ringing in the middle of the afternoon demolishing the rest of the day. No more waiting for the situation to change. -- 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
This was the woman Narasimhan had married, as opposed to whatever girl from Madras his family wanted for him. Subhash wondered how his family reacted to her. He wondered if she'd ever been to India. If she had, he wondered whether she'd liked it or hated it. He could not guess from looking at her -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The thought of Christmas overwhelms him. He no longer looks forward to the holiday; he wants only to be on the other side of the season. His impatience makes him feel that he is incontrovertibly, finally, an adult. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war, -- 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
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
But even as she was going through with it she knew it was useless, just as it was useless to save a single earring when the other half of the pair was lost -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I don't tackle major global events. I don't like to read about something - an event, a cataclysm - in fiction for the sake of reading it. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
A writer has to true to him or herself. Period. That's it! -- Jhumpa Lahiri
She believed she was not significant enough to cast a shadow of her own. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
It's easier to surrender to confinement. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Subhash was angry with himself for going along with it. For still needing to prove he could. He was sick of the fear that always rose up in him: that he would cease to exist, and that he and Udayan would cease to be brothers, were Subhash to resist him. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera. I -- 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
He still had the power to stagger her at timessimply the fact that he was breathing that all his organs were in their proper places that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
My parents' relationship with Kolkata is so strong. Growing up, the absence of Kolkata was always present in our lives. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Plato says the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Learning was an act of rediscovery, knowledge a form of remembering. -- 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
Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Books are the best means - private, discreet, reliable - of overcoming reality. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
He waited for chaotic games to end, for shouts to subside. His favorite moments were when he was alone, or felt alone. Lying in bed in the morning, watching sunlight flickering like a restless bird on the wall. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Glowing screens, increasingly foldable, portable, companionable, anticipating any possible question the human brain might generate. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The essential dilemma of my life is between my deep desire to belong and my suspicion of belonging. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
They tolerate my mistakes. They correct me, they encourage me, they provide the words I lack. They speak clearly, patiently. Just like parents with their children. The -- Jhumpa Lahiri
In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I try to represent specific experiences of specific characters, and that's all I want to try to do. I don't ever try to think about representing a culture, because its impossible, and someone will fault you. And it just doesn't interest me. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
We are all #humans and we all make #mistakes. We #hurt people even if we don't want to. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I realize that it's impossible to know a foreign language perfectly. For -- 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
He enjoys the passivity of sitting in a classroom again, listening to an instructor, being told what to do. He is reminded of being a student, of a time when his father was still alive. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Odd things made him love her. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
My father had always dreamed of getting a Ph.D., but certain life circumstances prevented him from following through. It was a tremendous, deep regret. The day I got my Ph.D., I saw in my father's face what it meant that I had done this. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Avoiding puddles, stepping over mats of hyacinth leaves that remained in place. Breathing the dank air. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
If you look at my characters as a group, they all have a different relationship with the way that places can signify emotion in them - and the way those bonds can be shattered. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
It was that she had already fallen in love, and been married, and had a child, and had her heart broken. He had yet to experience any of those things. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I just wanted to go home, to the language in which I was known, and loved. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I write about characters that interest me. And I don't think of my books as being forms of entertainment. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The Italians always know that I'm not Italian. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I think, like any artist or any writer, I just want to have that pure freedom of expression and of thought - the freedom to explore and move in unexpected ways. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I think that what I have been truly searching for as a person, as a writer, as a thinker, as a daughter, is freedom. That is my mission. A sense of liberty, the liberty that comes not only from self-awareness but also from letting go of many things. Many things that weigh us down. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
He felt the chill of her secrecy, numbing him, like a poison spreading quickly through his veins. -- 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
Some Indians will come up and say that a story reminded them of something very specific to their experience. Which may or may not be the case for non-Indians. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Those who don't belong to any specific place can't, in fact, return anywhere. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
He was blind to self-constraints, like an animal incapable of perceiving certain colors. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
For that story, I took as my subject a young woman whom I got to know over the course of a couple of visits. I never saw her having any health problems - but I knew she wanted to be married. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Identity has been such an explosive territory for me ... so hard, so painful at times. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don't think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I think one of the things that attracted me about theater and the stage was the ability to escape reality. And that is what I do in my work as a writer, but in a different way. And the freedom to put your own existence on ice and become another person. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
My grandfather says that's what books are for," Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. "To travel without moving an inch. -- 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
Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
So much of my writing derives from these questions that I ask myself - things that are utterly beyond my personal set of experiences - and it's my attempt to try to ... understand, to sort of break out of my own consciousness, you know, the limitations of my own life. -- 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
They've lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here ... It has become their home, but at the same time, for my parents, I don't think either of them will ever consciously think, 'I am an American.' -- 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
I feel my writing comes from a desire to ... well, it's motivated by many things, but it's inherently a contradiction in that I'm writing for myself, and it's a very interior journey. On the other hand, I feel that writers do make that interior journey out of a desire to connect. -- 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
He saw that his mother was dwelling in an alternate time, a more bearable reality. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in bowl. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end. -- 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
When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Dissecting my linguistic metamorphosis, I realize that I'm trying to get away from something, to free myself. I've been writing in Italian for almost two years, and I feel that I've been transformed, almost reborn. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
And yet my lexicon develops without logic, in a darting, fleeting manner. The words appear, accompany me for a while, then, often without warning, abandon me. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Belonging to another man and therefore not even a little bit to him. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I have two passports because I have to have at least one, and I really don't know how I define myself. And I feel that as I get older, I feel very fortunate to have, on paper, a dual nationality. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I think the fundamental thing about writing fiction is that you write what interests you and what inspires you. It can't be forced. I see no need to write about anything else or any other type of world. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Reading in another language implies a perpetual state of growth, of possibility. I -- Jhumpa Lahiri
He was proud to have come alone to America. To learn it, as he once must have learned to stand and walk and speak. He'd wanted so much to leave Calcutta, not only for the sake of his education but also - he could admit this to himself now - to take a step that Udayan never would. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
As he watched the couple the room went dark, and he spun around. Shoba had turned the lights off. She came back to the table and sat down, and after a moment Shukumar joined her. They wept together, for the things they now knew. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I don't know, he said, handing her the ticket. He'd been standing there all the while on the sidewalk, waiting for her. Waiting, until they were in the darkness of the theatre, to take her hand. -- 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
Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. -- 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
She has the gift of accepting her life. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
She had denied herself the pleasure of openly sharing life with the person she loved. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
It's hard to think of myself as an American, and yet I am not from India, a place where I was not born and where I have never lived. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I have two young children, and I will say that motherhood is its own peak, just like in the process of writing: one climbs and is continuously moving with each book. Becoming a mother is the greatest connection I've ever felt to being spiritual. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
He longed for sleep, but it would not immerse him; that night the waters he sought for his repose were deep enough to wade in, but not to swim. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
And yet he had loved her. A Bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She'd been prepared to live her life alone but from the moment he'd known her he'd needed her. -- 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
There's more than enough in the world I am currently writing about to last for several lifetimes of writing. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
For Gogol Ganguli- The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name. -- 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
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 see the people who have lived here forever. They walk quickly, indifferent to the buildings. They cross the squares without stopping. I -- Jhumpa Lahiri
She believed that he would be incapable of hurting her as Graham had. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
She has given birth to vagabonds. She is the keeper of all these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
My responsibility isn't to paint a flattering portrait; my responsibility is to paint a real portrait, a true portrait. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I watched your father killed before my eyes, she might have said. -- 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
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
Do what I will never do. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
My grandfather always says that's what books are for. To travel without moving an inch. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
In Italy, where I live now, I have put some distance between myself and the world that has formed me. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I feel as though I've gotten to a point where I don't really want to set a book in any real place ever again. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I have only the desire. Yet ultimately a desire is nothing but a crazy need. As -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
He learned not to mind the silences. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Everything in Bela's life has been a reaction. I am who I am, she would say, I live as I do because of you. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The highlight of my undergraduate years was a year-long Shakespeare course I took with Edward Tayler. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Given that she barely saw her father, given that she continued to measure out her contact with him, whether to deny herself or to deny him, she could not be sure. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
It took me a long time to even dare to envision myself as a writer. I was very uncertain and hesitant and afraid to pursue a creative life. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
How many times does a person write his name in a lifetime - a million? Two million? -- Jhumpa Lahiri
Is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt? -- Jhumpa Lahiri
When I write in Italian - this is just the metaphor that came to me immediately, and I really think this is what it is - I feel like I'm writing with my left hand. Because of that weakness, there is this enormous freedom that comes with it. -- Jhumpa Lahiri
So that she began to see herself more clearly, as a thin film of dust was wiped from a sheet of glass. -- Jhumpa Lahiri