Top 200 Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

2. “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

3. “Isolation offered its own form of companionship.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

4. “Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

5. “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

6. “Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

7. “Sexy means loving someone you donot know.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

8. “A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

9. “I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

10. “The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

11. “She has the gift of accepting her life.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

12. “And yet he had loved her. A Bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She’d been prepared to live her life alone but from the moment he’d known her he’d needed her.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

17. “Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

18. “You remind me of everything that followed.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

19. “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

20. “The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

21. “That’s what books are for, to travel without moving an inch.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

22. “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth. – NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, “The Custom-House.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

23. “Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

24. “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

25. “I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for ‘The Namesake,’ I felt that it had to be a novel – it couldn’t work as a story.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

26. “Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

27. “She supposed that all those years of loving a person who was dishonest had taught her a few things.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

28. “Reading in another language implies a perpetual state of growth, of possibility. I.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

29. “There’s no escape from the shadows that mount, inexorably, in this darkening season. Nor can we escape the shadows our families cast. That said, there are times I miss the pleasant shade a companion might provide.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

30. “A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

31. “Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

32. “They tolerate my mistakes. They correct me, they encourage me, they provide the words I lack. They speak clearly, patiently. Just like parents with their children. The.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

33. “When I sit down to write, I don’t think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

34. “The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

35. “If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me – everything that makes me react, in short – I have to put it into words.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

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

— Jhumpa Lahiri

37. “Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

38. “Do what I will never do.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

39. “One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

40. “And so the eight months are put behind them, quickly shed, quickly forgotten, like clothes worn for a special occasion, or for a season that has passed, suddenly cumbersome, irrelevant to their lives.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

41. “Unlike her parents, and her other relatives, her grandmother had not admonished Ashima not to eat beef or wear skirts or cut off her hair or forget her family the moment she landed in Boston. Her grandmother had not been fearful of such signs of betrayal; she was the only person to predict, rightly, that Ashima would never change.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

42. “She has the gift of accepting her life; as he comes to know her, he realizes that she has never wished she were anyone other than herself, raised in any other place, in any other way.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

43. “He has no ABCD friends at college. He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

44. “He looked at her, in her red plaid skirt and strawberry T-shirt, a woman not yet thirty, who loved neither her husband nor her children, who had already fallen out of love with life.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

45. “Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge – she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind. It was easier to turn her back on the two countries that could claim her in favor of one that had no claim whatsoever.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

46. “It’s not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband’s name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying Ashoke’s name, she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as “Are you listening to me?”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

47. “Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again. The.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

48. “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

49. “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

50. “He especially enjoyed watching Mrs. Sen as she chopped things, seated on newspapers on the living room floor. Instead of a knife she used a blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle in distant seas. The blade was hinged at one end to a narrow wooden base.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri