Top 100 Lahiri's Quotes
#1. Why didn't this one say this, or tell someone that, or let anyone know she or he was so unhappy, so lonely, so scared? Lahiri's characters, just like people all around us, are constantly telling each other important things, but not necessarily in words. WHEN
Will Schwalbe
#2. Lahiri's characters, just like people all around us, are constantly telling each other important things, but not necessarily in words.
Will Schwalbe
#3. A writer has to true to him or herself. Period. That's it!
Jhumpa Lahiri
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it would.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#16. station on Cape Cod looks close to where you are. It's in a place called Wellfleet.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#17. I've always been searching to arrive at a certain voice that will probably elude me forever.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#18. Cease being a prisoner of the body; using the secret key of Kriya, learn to escape into Spirit.
Lahiri Mahasaya
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. No man wants a woman who dresses like a dishwasher.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#22. A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing
Jhumpa Lahiri
#23. I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#24. 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
#26. 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
#27. My grandfather always says that's what books are for. To travel without moving an inch.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#28. That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. There's more than enough in the world I am currently writing about to last for several lifetimes of writing.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. I realize that it's impossible to know a foreign language perfectly. For
Jhumpa Lahiri
#46. 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
#47. 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
#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. Writing is so humbling; there's no confidence involved.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. The imperfection became a mark of distinction about their home. Something visitors noticed, the first family anecdote that was told.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. I started writing after college, slowly, secretly writing.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Jhumpa Lahiri calls living in a foreign country "an eternal pregnancy"; an uncomfortable wait for something impossible to define.
G. Willow Wilson
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#83. A woman who had fallen out of love with her life
Jhumpa Lahiri
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. She knew that the word providence meant foresight, the future beheld before it was experienced.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. I love Rome. I'm very happy there. I wasn't in New York.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#91. 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
#92. It made him shy, they way he felt the first time they stood together in a mirror.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#93. 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
#94. Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I'm also more exposed.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#95. It is the goddess Kali," Mrs. Dixit explained brightly,
Jhumpa Lahiri
#96. I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#100. 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
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