Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount t...

On weekdays, as soon as she picked Bela from the bus stop and brought her home, she went straight in...

...American book jackets reflect the spirit of country - little homogeneity, lots of diversity.

While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new worl...

On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a ...

A woman who had fallen out of love with her life

Those who don't belong to any specific place can't, in fact, return anywhere.

Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, ...

I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a non-existent one.

Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocea...

When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last...

I'm bound to fail when I write in Italian, but unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn't ...

My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father ca...

With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before

In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced Engl...

I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a b...

He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where ...

I don't know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in my parents' marriage. And it's in...

If you look at my characters as a group, they all have a different relationship with the way that pl...

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and...

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders...

She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversi...

I think that what I have been truly searching for as a person, as a writer, as a thinker, as a daugh...

Belonging to another man and therefore not even a little bit to him.

I owed the greater apology, but at the same time I knew that was done was done, that no matter what ...

He still had the power to stagger her at timessimply the fact that he was breathing that all his org...

But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years ...

There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simp...

I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you.

He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly bec...

The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters—it was something about the way they carried th...

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

No more bells ringing in the middle of the afternoon demolishing the rest of the day. No more waitin...

In their silence they continued both to protect me and to punish me. The memory of that night was no...

Will you remember this day, Gogol?" his father had asked, turning back to look at him, his hands pre...

My grandfather says that's what books are for," Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volum...

...that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants,...

Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so f...

It's easier to surrender to confinement.

Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the b...

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

That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.

The blood of too many, dissolving the very stain.

But even as she was going through with it she knew it was useless, just as it was useless to save a ...

There was the focus of seeking pleasure, and the numbing effect, once they were finished, removing a...

He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the pas...

Nor was her love for Udayan recognizable or intact. Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging throu...

She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart an...

But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out ...

In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.

Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold.