Top 200 Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “I believe that reading in a foreign language is the most intimate way of reading.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

153. “Books are the best means – private, discreet, reliable – of overcoming reality.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

154. “Why, as an adult, as a writer, am I interested in this new relationship with imperfection? What does it offer me? I would say a stunning clarity, a more profound self-awareness. Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

155. “I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

156. “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

157. “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

158. “I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “Back then she had only wanted to shut the door to it, to be apart from Subhash and Bela. She’d been incapable of cherishing what she’d had.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

163. “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

164. “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

165. “A writer has to true to him or herself. Period. That’s it!”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

166. “She believed she was not significant enough to cast a shadow of her own.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

167. “He looks up at her, and behind her, at the sky, which holds more stars than he ever has seen at one time, crowded together, a mess of dust and gems.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

168. “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

169. “It’s easy to set a story anywhere if you get a good guidebook and get some basic street names, and some descriptions, but, for me, yes, I am indebted to my travels to India for several of the stories.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

170. “If the process of writing is a dream, the book cover represents the awakening.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

171. “Whenever I can, in my study, on the subway, in bed before going to sleep, I immerse myself in Italian. I enter another land, unexplored, murky.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

172. “And yet my lexicon develops without logic, in a darting, fleeting manner. The words appear, accompany me for a while, then, often without warning, abandon me.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

173. “You, who chafed at the collective we created, who only wanted to subtract yourself, always, from the equation, throwing it off-balance.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

174. “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

175. “Odd things made him love her.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

176. “She prefers books to jewels and saris. She believes as I do.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

177. “It’s a sort of literary act of survival. I don’t have many words to express myself – rather, the opposite. I’m aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

178. “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

179. “It usually sits on the night table, so that I can easily look up an unknown word while I’m reading. This book allows me to read other books, to open the door of a new language. It accompanies me, even now, when I go on vacation, on trips. It has become a necessity. If, when I leave, I forget to take it with me, I feel slightly uneasy, as if I’d forgotten my toothbrush or a change of socks.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

180. “I realize that it’s impossible to know a foreign language perfectly. For.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

181. “I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device – recording and projecting.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

182. “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

183. “When I write in Italian, I think in Italian; to translate into English, I have to wake up another part of my brain. I don’t like the sensation at all. I feel alienated. As if I’d run into a boyfriend I’d tired of, someone I’d left years earlier. He no longer appeals to me.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

184. “Maladies, poorly interpreted, can’t be cured.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

185. “He enjoys the passivity of sitting in a classroom again, listening to an instructor, being told what to do. He is reminded of being a student, of a time when his father was still alive.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

186. “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

187. “Things were different now, of course; those solitary hours he’d once savored had become a prison for him, a commonplace.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

188. “Writing down call numbers with short pencils, searching up and down aisles that would turn dark when the timers on the lights expired. She recalls, visually, certain passages in the books she’d read. Which side of the book, where on the page.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

189. “I’m flummoxed by this unraveling of time, I’m losing my grip on myself. I know that nothing awful will happen on the other side of the door. If anything, I’m about to have a perfectly forgettable day: a class to teach, a meeting with colleagues, maybe a movie. But I’m afraid of forgetting something crucial – my cell phone or my identity card, my health insurance or my keys. And I’m afraid of running into trouble.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

190. “We live here now, she was born here.” She seemed genuinely proud of the fact, as if it were a reflection of my character. In her estimation, I knew, I was assured a safe life, an easy life, a fine education, every opportunity. I would never have to eat rationed food, or obey curfews, or watch riots from my rooftop, or hide neighbors in water tanks to prevent them from being shot, as she and my father had.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

191. “Is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt?”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

192. “Personally, I think it deplorable to place the words and opinions of others on the book jacket. I want the first words read by the reader of my book to be written by me.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

193. “The sunlight on her hair.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

194. “Even those family members who continue to live seem dead somehow, always invisible, impossible to touch.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

195. “The sky, unlike the sea, never holds on to the people that pass through it. The sky contains nothing of our spirit, it doesn’t care. Always shifting, altering its aspect from one moment to the next, it can’t be defined.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

196. “Without saying a word to each other we know that, if we chose to, we could venture into something reckless, also pointless.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

197. “What did I do? I read books and studied. I listened to my parents and did what they asked me to. Even though, in the end, I never made them happy. I didn’t like myself, and something told me I’d end up alone.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

198. “Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

199. “Writing is a way to salvage life, to give it form and meaning. It exposes what we have hidden, unearths what we have neglected, misremembered, denied. It is a method of capturing, of pinning down, but it is also a form of truth, of liberation.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

200. “Willfully anticipating, in ignorance and in hope – this was how most people lived.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri