Top 200 Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “My grandfather always says that’s what books are for. To travel without moving an inch.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

52. “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

53. “How many times does a person write his name in a lifetime – a million? Two million?”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

54. “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

55. “Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

56. “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

57. “For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy – a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling of sorts... Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

58. “When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive. Because words bring back everything: the place, the people, the life, the streets, the life, the sky, the flowers, the sounds. When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. Your breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

59. “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

60. “With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

61. “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

62. “Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

63. “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

64. “By now she has learned that her husband likes his food on the salty side, that his favorite thing about lamb curry is the potatoes, and that he likes to finish his dinner with a small final helping of rice and dal.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

65. “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

66. “Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk. In the end I realise that it wasn’t a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

67. “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

68. “I have terrible urges, Mr. Kapasi, to throw things away. One day I had the urge to throw everything I own out the window, the television, the children, everything. Don’t you think it’s unhealthy?”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

69. “Do I remind you of that night?” “Not at all,” his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. “You remind me of everything that followed.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

70. “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

71. “She calculates the Indian time on her hands. The tip of her thumb strikes each rung of the brown ladders etched onto the backs of her fingers, then stops at the middle of the third: it is nine and a half hours ahead in Calcutta, already evening, half past eight.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

72. “What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

73. “It’s easier to surrender to confinement.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

74. “Assured by his grades and his apparent indifference to girls, his parents don’t suspect Gogol of being, in his own fumbling way, an American teenager.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

75. “Without language you can’t feel that you have a legitimate, respected presence. You are without a voice, without power.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

76. “She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream, or dropping a letter in a mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

77. “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

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

— Jhumpa Lahiri

80. “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

81. “I just wanted to go home, to the language in which I was known, and loved.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

82. “She has given birth to vagabonds. She is the keeper of all these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

83. “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

84. “In the pool I lose myself. My thoughts merge and flow. Everything – my body, my heart, the universe – seems tolerable when I’m protected by water and nothing touches me. All I think about is the effort. Below my body there’s a restless play of dark and light projected onto the bottom of the pool, that drifts away like smoke.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

85. “He felt the chill of her secrecy, numbing him, like a poison spreading quickly through his veins.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

86. “The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol. “For Gogol Ganguli,” it says on the front endpaper in his father’s tranquil hand, in red ballpoint ink, the letters rising gradually, optimistically, on the diagonal toward the upper right-hand corner of the page. “The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name” is written within quotation marks.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

87. “The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

88. “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

89. “It had ended bitterly; though at the time he could never come up with a reason not to, he could not bring himself to propose. She had not taken hold of him; he could see now that that was the problem. And so he left the tears and fury in Milan and took the train down to Rome.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

90. “I think that translating is the most profound, most intimate way of reading. A translation is a wonderful, dynamic encounter between two languages, two texts, two writers. It entails a doubling, a renewal... It was a way of getting close to different languages, of feeling connected to writers very distant from me in space and time.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

91. “Men require that you caress them with your expression.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

92. “That night when I went to the bathroom I only pretended to brush my teeth, for I feared that I would somehow rinse the prayer out as well. I wet the brush and rearranged the tube of paste to prevent my parents from asking any questions, and feel asleep with sugar on my tongue.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

93. “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

94. “She was unprepared for the landscape to be so altered. For there to be no trace of that evening, forty autumns ago.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

95. “In Hindu philosophy the three tenses – past, present, future – were said to exist simultaneously in God. God was timeless, but time was personified as the god of death. Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

96. “She had denied herself the pleasure of openly sharing life with the person she loved.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

97. “Plato says the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

98. “I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

99. “In their silence they continued both to protect me and to punish me. The memory of that night was now the only tie between us, eclipsing everything else.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

100. “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