Top 100 Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I started writing after college, slowly, secretly writing.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#12. 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
#13. I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#14. 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
#15. I love Rome. I'm very happy there. I wasn't in New York.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. 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
#20. A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing
Jhumpa Lahiri
#21. No man wants a woman who dresses like a dishwasher.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. I'm from Kingston, R.I., sort of on the University of Rhode Island campus - on the margins of that, actually.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. On the technical side, I hope that my writing is evolving and maturing, ripening, deepening.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#32. Brahmin who'd learned the tribal dialects. He refused
Jhumpa Lahiri
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Stretched to the breaking point by all that now stood between them, but at the same time refusing to break.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#39. A writer has to true to him or herself. Period. That's it!
Jhumpa Lahiri
#40. 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
#41. The blood of too many, dissolving the very stain.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#46. 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
#47. Writing is so humbling; there's no confidence involved.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#48. 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
#49. Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#50. Many of my characters struggle with loneliness, that is fair to say.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#51. She supposed that all those years of loving a person who was dishonest had taught her a few things.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. The Italians always know that I'm not Italian.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#57. 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
#58. Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#59. 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
#60. He saw that his mother was dwelling in an alternate time, a more bearable reality.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Only then, forced at six months to confront his destiny, does he begin to cry.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#64. 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
#65. The highlight of my undergraduate years was a year-long Shakespeare course I took with Edward Tayler.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#70. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#79. Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. I have very little choice. If I don't write, I feel dreadful. So I write.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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