Quotes from Jhumpa Lahiri

American book jackets reflect the spirit of country - little homogeneity, lots of diversity.

At four Bela was developing a memory. The word yesterday entered her vocabulary, though its meaning was elastic, synonymous with whatever was no longer the case. The past collapsed, in no particular order, contained by a single word.

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.

He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he'd landed and made his life, was not his

He adjusted his body in relation to hers. His head angled down, his hand forming a canopy between them to shield her face from the sun. It was a useless gesture. only silence. The sunlight on her hair

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

If I stop to think about fans, or bestselling, or not bestselling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It's like staring at the mirror all day.

Amava troppo il mondo, la gente. Amava fare lunghe passeggiate nel tardo pomeriggio osservando ciò che la circondava. Amava il verde del mare, la luce del crepuscolo, i sassi sparsi sulla sabbia. Amava il sapore di una pera rossa in autunno, la luna piena e pesante d'inverno che brillava fra le nuvole. Amava il calore del suo letto, un buon libro da leggere senza interruzione. Per godere di questo, sarebbe vissuta per sempre.

given that she barely saw her father, given that she continued to measure out her contact with him, whether to deny herself or to deny him, she could not be sure.

Assured by his grades and his apparent indifference to girls, his parents don't suspect Gogol of being, in his own fumbling way, an American teenager.

To Travel without moving an inch.

The only way to even begin to understand language is to love it so much that we allow it to confound us and to torment us to the extent that it threatens to swallow us whole.

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?

Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.

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.

Then again, how could he expect Bela to be interested in marriage, given the example he and Gauri had given? They were a family of solitaries. They had collided and dispersed. This was her legacy. If nothing else, she had inherited that impulse from them.

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.

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

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.

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.

It had ended bitterly; though at the time he could never come up with a reason not to, he could not bring himself to propose. She had not taken hold of him; he could see now that that was the problem. And so he left the tears and fury in Milan and took the train down to Rome.

Translation will open up entire realms of possibilities, unforeseen pathways that will newly guide and inspire the writer's work, and possibly even transform it. For to translate is to look into a mirror and see someone other than oneself.

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

but these talents could not make up for the fact that she did not possess a fair complexion, and so a string of men had rejected her to her face.