Quotes from Jhumpa Lahiri

In Bengali class, Gogol is taught to read and write his ancestral alphabet, which begins at the back of his throat with an unaspirated K and marches steadily across the roof of his mouth, ending with elusive vowels that hover outside his lips

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.

Everything is there

Each revelation was devastating. Everything she said. And yet, even as my life shattered in pieces, I felt as if I were finally coming up for air.

The nickname had irritated and pleased her at the same time. It made her feel foolish, but she was aware that in renaming her he had claimed her somehow, already made her his own.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In those six weeks I regarded her arrival as I would the arrival of a coming month, or season - something inevitable, but meaningless at the same time.

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.

She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still.

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.

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.

Maladies, poorly interpreted, can't be cured.

avevo bisogno di una lingua differente: una lingua che fosse un luogo di affetto e di riflessione. —ANTONIO TABUCCHI

I might have said no, I might have just stayed put. But something's telling me to push past the barrier of my life

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

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.

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.

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.

Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people's lives, though all of it, she thinks, was previously wanted, once useful. She feels the sun scorching the back of her neck. The heat is at its worst now, the rains still a few months away. The task satisfies her. It passes the time.

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

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.