Quotes About Jhumpa

#1. Jhumpa Lahiri calls living in a foreign country "an eternal pregnancy"; an uncomfortable wait for something impossible to define.

G. Willow Wilson

#2. The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.

Karen Thompson Walker

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. I started writing after college, slowly, secretly writing.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#12. 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

#13. What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. The imperfection became a mark of distinction about their home. Something visitors noticed, the first family anecdote that was told.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#32. It is the goddess Kali," Mrs. Dixit explained brightly,

Jhumpa Lahiri

#33. Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I'm also more exposed.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#34. 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

#35. It made him shy, they way he felt the first time they stood together in a mirror.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#36. 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

#37. I love Rome. I'm very happy there. I wasn't in New York.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. She knew that the word providence meant foresight, the future beheld before it was experienced.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. A woman who had fallen out of love with her life

Jhumpa Lahiri

#45. What she'd done for him, because he'd asked.

Jhumpa Lahiri

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

Jhumpa Lahiri

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. To Travel without moving an inch.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#54. 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

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

Jhumpa Lahiri

#56. A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing

Jhumpa Lahiri

#57. No man wants a woman who dresses like a dishwasher.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. I've always been searching to arrive at a certain voice that will probably elude me forever.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#61. station on Cape Cod looks close to where you are. It's in a place called Wellfleet.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#62. There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it would.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. I'm from Kingston, R.I., sort of on the University of Rhode Island campus - on the margins of that, actually.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#72. 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

#73. I write to feel alone.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. On the technical side, I hope that my writing is evolving and maturing, ripening, deepening.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#81. Brahmin who'd learned the tribal dialects. He refused

Jhumpa Lahiri

#82. 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

#83. Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again. The

Jhumpa Lahiri

#84. She prefers books to jewels and saris. She believes as I do.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#85. 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

#86. I tend to read mostly 20th-century fiction, 20th-, 21st-century fiction in Italian.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#87. Books seem so much more - much more sacred to me, and more important and essential, than they were when I was young.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#88. 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

#89. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#90. 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

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

Jhumpa Lahiri

#92. 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

#93. 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

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

Jhumpa Lahiri

#95. 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

#96. With her own hand she'd painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#97. asked Paul to help him put it out on the

Jhumpa Lahiri

#98. Sexy means loving someone you do not know.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#99. 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

#100. 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