Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes & Sayings

We are all #humans and we all make #mistakes. We #hurt people even if we don't want to. — 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

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

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

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me ... so hard, so painful at times. — 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

He learned not to mind the silences. — 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

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

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

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

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

I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I watched your father killed before my eyes, she might have said. — 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

The givers and keepers of Gogol's name are far from him now. One dead. Another, a widow, on the verge of a different sort of departure, in order to dwell, as his father does, in a separate world. She will call him, once a week, on the phone. She will learn to send e-mail, she says. Once or twice a week, he will hear "Gogol" over the wires, see it typed on a screen. As for all the people in the house, all the mashis and meshos to whom he is still, and will always be, Gogol - now that his mother is moving away, how often will he see them? Without people in the world to call him Gogol, no matter how long he himself lives, Gogol Ganguli will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of loved ones, and so, cease to exist. Yet the thought of this eventual demise provides no sense of victory, no solace. It provides no solace at all. — Jhumpa Lahiri

What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said. — 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 was blind to self-constraints, like an animal incapable of perceiving certain colors. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Ashoke suspects that Mrs. Jones (the secretary at his new job as a professor) ... is about his own mother's age. Mrs. Jones leads a life that Ashoke's mother would consider humiliating: eating alone, driving herself to work in snow and sleet, seeing her children and grandchildren, at most, three or four times a year. — 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

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

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

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 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

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

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

A woman who had fallen out of love with her life — Jhumpa Lahiri

Avoiding puddles, stepping over mats of hyacinth leaves that remained in place. Breathing the dank air. — 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

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

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

During the first months in Rome, my clandestine Italian diary is the only thing that consoles me, that gives me stability. Often, awake and restless in the middle of the night, I go to the desk to compose some paragraphs in Italian. It's an absolutely secret project. No one suspects, no one knows. I don't recognize the person who is writing in this diary, in this new, approximate language. But I know that it's the most genuine, most vulnerable part of me. — Jhumpa Lahiri

A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing — Jhumpa Lahiri

He regretted his surliness when she had refused. She was the only person he'd met in his adult life who had any understanding of his past, the only woman he wanted to remain connected to. He didn't want to leave it up to chance to find her again, didn't want to share her with another man. That last day in Volterra he had searched for a way to tell her these things. She had not accused him, as Franca had, of his own cowardice, of his inability to form attachments. But Hema's refusal to accuse him made him feel worse, and without her he was lost. — 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

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

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

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

I always wanted to grow up in a house full of books, English books, and I wanted the sort of fireplaces that worked, overstuffed chairs, that whole kind of fantasy of a bookish New England life. So the library gave me that; for the hours that I was there, I was surrounded by that atmosphere that I craved in my life. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Time flowed for Bela in the opposite direction. The day after yesterday, she sometimes said. Pronounced slightly differently, Bela's name, the name of a flower, was itself the word for a span of time, a portion of the day. Shakal bela meant morning; bikel bela, afternoon. Ratrir bela was night. Bela's yesterday was a receptacle for anything her mind stored. Any experience or impression that had come before. Her memory was brief, its contents limited. Lacking chronology, randomly rearranged. — 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

The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator. — 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

Books are the best means - private, discreet, reliable - of overcoming reality. — 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

Be sure to keep my ruby choker and the pearl and emerald set for the person you will marry," she said during one of these walks. "I'm not planning on getting married any time soon," I told her, and she said that she wished she could say the same for dying. Ultimately, I disobeyed her. After she was gone I was unable to open up and examine the contents of all those flat red boxes she'd kept hidden in a suitcase on her closet shelf, never mind set something aside for the sake of my future happiness. — Jhumpa Lahiri

In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists. — Jhumpa Lahiri

In Italy, where I live now, I have put some distance between myself and the world that has formed me. — 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

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

I have very little choice. If I don't write, I feel dreadful. So I write. — Jhumpa Lahiri

No man wants a woman who dresses like a dishwasher. — Jhumpa Lahiri

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

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be. — 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

It's easier to surrender to confinement. — 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

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

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

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

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

When you're in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don't want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity. — 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

I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, strike us to our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music? We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we weren't aware of before. We want to transform ourselves, just as Ovid's masterwork transformed me. — 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

In the end the boy had died one evening in his mother's arms, his limbs burning with fever, but then there was the funeral to pay for, and the other children who were born soon enough, and the newer, bigger house, and the good schools and tutors, and the fine shoes and the television, and the countless other ways he tried to console his wife and to keep her from crying in her sleep, and so when the doctor offered to pay him twice as much as he earned at the grammar school, he accepted. — 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

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

Did you have to try for a while?" He thought it a bold question, coming from a stranger. But he was honest with her, his thoughts still loose from the spiked lemonade. "Would you believe, with Maya it happened the first time," he said. He remembered how proud he'd felt, how powerful. The first time in his life he'd had sex without contraception a life had begun. — Jhumpa Lahiri

What had Subhash told Bela, to keep her away? Nothing, probably. It was the just punishment for her crime. She understood now what it meant to walk away from her child. It had been her own act of killing. A connection she had severed, resulting in a death that applied only to the two of them. It was a crime worse than anything Udayan had committed. She had never written to Bela. Never dared reach out, to reassure her. What reassurance was hers to give? What she'd done could never be undone. Her silence, her absence, seemed decent in comparison. — Jhumpa Lahiri

He was increasingly aware these days of how much he owned, of the ongoing effort his life required. The thousands of trips to the grocery store he had made, all the heaping bags of food, first paper, then plastic, now canvas sacks brought from home, unloaded from the trunk of the car and unpacked and stored in cupboards, all to sustain a single body. — Jhumpa Lahiri

With the birth of Akash, in his sudden, perfect presence, Ruma had felt awe for the first time in her life. He still had the power to stagger her at times
simply 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. Only the words her mother used were more literal, enriching the tired phrase with meaning: "He is made from your meat and bone." It had caused Ruma to acknowledge the supernatural in everyday life. But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible. — Jhumpa Lahiri

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

One week after moving to Rome, I started writing in my diary in Italian. — 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

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

Things were different now, of course; those solitary hours he'd once savored had become a prison for him, a commonplace. — Jhumpa Lahiri

You remind me of everything that followed. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories. — Jhumpa Lahiri

There's more than enough in the world I am currently writing about to last for several lifetimes of writing. — Jhumpa Lahiri

It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words, one after another, unencumbered by his own efforts. In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right with the world, that all struggles were rewarded, that all of life's mistakes made sense in the end. The promise that he would hear from Mrs. Das now filled him with the same belief. — 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

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

How many times does a person write his name in a lifetime - a million? Two million? — 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

Relax," Edith says. "The perfect name will come to you in time." Which is when Gogol announces, "There's no such thing." "No such thing as what?" Astrid says. "There's no such thing as a perfect name. I think that human beings should be allowed to name themselves when they turn eighteen," he adds. "Until then, pronouns. — 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 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

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

He felt the chill of her secrecy, numbing him, like a poison spreading quickly through his veins. — Jhumpa Lahiri

For as grateful as she feels for the company of the Nandis and Dr. Gupta, these acquaintances are only substitutes for the people who really ought to be surrounding them. Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby's birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true. — Jhumpa Lahiri

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. — 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

He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. 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. — Jhumpa Lahiri