Quotes from Jhumpa Lahiri

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.

The next time she visits her father she'll speak to him in English. Were her mother ever to stand before her, even if Bela could choose any language on earth in which to speak, she would have nothing to say. But no, that's not true. She remains in constant communication with her. Everything in Bela's life has been a reaction. I am who I am, she would say, I live as I do because of you.

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. He

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

The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M.

That's what books are for, to travel without moving an inch.

Men require that you caress them with your expression

I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, strike 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 we weren't aware of before. We want to transform ourselves, just as Ovid's masterwork transformed me.

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

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

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.

T]hey are trying to find the right word, to choose, finally, the one that is most exact, most incisive. It's a process of sifting, which is exhausting and, at times, exasperating. Writers can't avoid it. The heart of the craft lies there.

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.

The blood of too many, dissolving the very stain.

Bilmezlik ve umut içinde gönüllü bir beklenti hali... Ä°ÅŸte böyle ya??yordu çoÄŸu insan.

Une langue étrangère, c'est comme un muscle frêle, délicat. Si l'on ne s'en sert pas, il s'affaiblit.

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.

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.

But it's not just my eyes that suffer at dawn, it's my heart that breaks. I feel the light that blazes across the city, striking my face but also warming my marrow, and as it rises I continue to look at my neighbors' laundry, threadbare and bone-dry. Then I close my eyes so that I see the light through my eyelids, and I regret being typically sluggish and missing out on this extraordinary, everyday phenomenon

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?

Only then, forced at six months to confront his destiny, does he begin to cry.

The years the couple have together are a shared conclusion to lives separately built, separately lived. There is no use wondering what might have happened if the man had met her in his forties, or in his twenties. He would not have married her then.

There was the focus of seeking pleasure, and the numbing effect, once they were finished, removing all specific thoughts from her brain. It ushered in the solid, dreamless sleep that otherwise eluded her.

tour guide tells them that after the Taj was completed, each of the builders, twenty-two thousand men, had his thumbs cut off so that the structure could never be built again.