Quotes from Jhumpa Lahiri

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

Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.

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.

She'd say solitude was a lack and nothing more. There's no point discussing it given that she's blind to the small pleasures my solitude affords me. In spite of how she's clung to me over the years my point of view doesn't interest her, and this gulf between

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Willfully anticipating, in ignorance and in hope—this was how most people lived.

Le parole sconosciute mi ricordano che c'è tanto che non conosco in questo mondo.

Le parole sconosciute rappresentano un abisso vertiginoso, fecondo. Un abisso che contiene tutto ciò che mi sfugge, tutto il possibile.

In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another.

He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share.

It has been said by many that the risk, for the author who self-translates, is to rewrite more than translate, given that there are no rules to obey when the only authority is oneself. What is the meaning of obedience, of faithfulness, when the other does not exist. 57

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.

Non avrei un vero bisogno di conoscere questa lingua. Non vivo in Italia, non ho amici italiani. Ho solo il desiderio. Ma alla fine un desiderio non è altro che un bisogno folle. Come in tanti rapporti passionali, la mia infatuazione diventerà una devozione, un'ossessione. Ci sarà sempre qualcosa di squilibrato, di non corrisposto. Mi sono innamorata, ma ciò che amo resta indifferente. La lingua non avrà mai bisogno di me.

For Gogol Ganguli- The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name.

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.

Cammino sulla superficie, la parte accesibile. Ma so, da scrittrice, che una lingua esiste nelle ossa, nel midollo. Che la vera vita della lingua, la sostanza è lì.

Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end. "Gogol

A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.

he wanted to relive those confused days, that life of discovery, to be bound to those round tables and lectures and exams. There were things he had always meant to understand better [...] He wanted to read what he was told each evening, to do as he was told. There were great writers he had never read, would never read. His daughters would begin that journey soon enough, the world opening up for them in its entirety.

He was a hermit; true peace, for him, meant staying indoors, staying put in a familiar place.