Top 200 Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Jhumpa Lahiri

103. “Should I dream of a day, in the future, when I’ll no longer need the dictionary, the notebook, the pen? A day when I can read in Italian without tools, the way I read in English? Shouldn’t that be the point of all this? I don’t think so. When I read in Italian, I’m a more active reader, more involved, even if less skilled. I like the effort. I prefer the limitations. I know that in some way my ignorance is useful to me.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

104. “The unknown words remind me that there’s a lot I don’t know in this world.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

105. “Solitude: it’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

106. “While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. 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

107. “Solitude demands a precise assessment of time, I’ve always understood this. It’s like the money in your wallet: you have to know how much time you need to kill, how much to spend before dinner, what’s left over before going to bed.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

108. “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

109. “The thought of Christmas overwhelms him. He no longer looks forward to the holiday; he wants only to be on the other side of the season. His impatience makes him feel that he is incontrovertibly, finally, an adult.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

110. “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

111. “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

112. “In a sense, I’m used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. 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

113. “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

114. “She knew that the word providence meant foresight, the future beheld before it was experienced.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

115. “In the face of everything that seems to me unattainable, I marvel. Without a sense of marvel at things, without wonder, one can’t create anything.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

116. “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

117. “Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

118. “I think it’s a hesitant book and at the same time bold. A text both private and public. On the one hand it springs from my other books. The themes, ultimately, are unchanged: identity, alienation, belonging. But the wrapping, the contents, the body and soul are transfigured.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

119. “Depression” was a foreign word to them, an American thing. In their opinion their children were immune from the hardships and injustices they had left behind in India, as if the inoculations the pediatrician had given Sudha and Rahul when they were babies guaranteed them an existence free of suffering.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

120. “In my case there is another distance, another schism. I don’t know Bengali perfectly. I don’t know how to read it, or even write it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I’ve always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language, too. As.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

121. “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

122. “A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

123. “It didn’t matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

124. “For that story, I took as my subject a young woman whom I got to know over the course of a couple of visits. I never saw her having any health problems – but I knew she wanted to be married.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

125. “He regretted only one thing: that he had not met her sooner, that he had not known her every day of his life.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

126. “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

127. “No parent ever called a child by his good name. Good names had no place within a family.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

128. “Is there any place we’re not moving through? Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around. I’m related to these related terms. These words are my abode, my only foothold.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

129. “Like certain faces among the people I see on the street every day, certain words, for some reason, stand out, and leave an impression on me. Others remain in the background, negligible. After.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

130. “I owed the greater apology, but at the same time I knew that was done was done, that no matter what I said now I would never be able to make it right.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

131. “She’d told Bela that the feeling would ebb but never fully go away. It would form part of her landscape, wherever she went. She said that her mother’s absence would always be present in her thoughts. She told Bela that there would never be an answer for why she’d gone.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

132. “She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day’s headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her from breaking news to articles archived years ago. At every moment the past is there, appended to the present. It’s a version of Bela’s definition, in childhood, of yesterday.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

133. “The moments of transition, in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

134. “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

135. “He learned not to mind the silences.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

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

— Jhumpa Lahiri

137. “Even though I now speak the language fairly well, the spoken language doesn’t help me. A conversation involves a sort of collaboration and, often, an act of forgiveness. When I speak I can make mistakes, but I’m somehow able to make myself understood. On the page I am alone. The spoken language is a kind of antechamber with respect to the written, which has a stricter, more elusive logic.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

138. “So that she began to see herself more clearly, as a thin film of dust was wiped from a sheet of glass.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

139. “He was blind to self-constraints, like an animal incapable of perceiving certain colors.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

140. “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

141. “And wasn’t it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn’t it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one’s life with, after making a family with that person, even in spite of missing that person... that solitude was what one relished the most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

142. “The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters-it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too son and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

143. “No more bells ringing in the middle of the afternoon demolishing the rest of the day. No more waiting for the situation to change.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

144. “I have only the desire. Yet ultimately a desire is nothing but a crazy need. As.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

145. “In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, ‘Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?’ I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

146. “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

147. “And yet she didn’t want to kill herself. She loved the world too much, and people. She loved taking long walks in the late afternoon, and observing her surroundings. She loved the green of the sea, the light of dusk, the rocks scattered on the sand. She loved the taste of a red pear in autumn, the full, heavy winter moon that shone amid the clouds. She loved the warmth of her bed, a good book to read without being interrupted. To enjoy that, she would have lived forever.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

148. “I start with very short pieces, usually no more than a handwritten page. I try to focus on something specific: a person, a moment, a place. I do what I ask my student to do when I teach creative writing. I explain to them that such fragments are the first steps to take before constructing a story. I think a writer should observe the real world before imagining a nonexistent one.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

149. “When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

150. “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