Quotes from Jhumpa Lahiri

Though there are only inches between them, for an instant his father is a stranger, a man who has kept a secret, has survived a tragedy, a man whose past he does not fully know. A man who is vulnerable, who has suffered in an inconceivable way.

But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day.

The letter is dated three weeks ago, and from it they learn that Ashima's grandmother has had a stroke, that her right side is permanently paralyzed, her mind dim. She can no longer chew, barely swallows, remembers and recognizes little of her eighty-odd years. "She is with us still, but to be honest we have already lost her," her father has written. "Prepare yourself, Ashima. Perhaps you may not see her again.

Is that what you think of when you think of me?" Gogol asks him. "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.

The Arnolfini Marriage by van Eyck

It's the first apartment he has to himself, after an evolving chain of roommates all through college and graduate school.

I see the people who have lived here forever. They walk quickly, indifferent to the buildings. They cross the squares without stopping. I

That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.

The effort flops like a just-caught fish inside her. A brief burst of possibility as the name is typed onto the screen, as she clicks to activate the search. Hope thrashing in the process of turning cold.

The better I understand the language, the more confusing it is.

In some senses Ashoke and Ashima live the lives of the extremely aged, those for whom everyone they once knew and loved is lost, those who survive and are consoled by memory alone.

He was increasingly aware these days of how much he owned, of the ongoing effort his life required. The thousands of trips to the grocery store he had made, all the heaping bags of food, first paper, then plastic, now canvas sacks brought from home, unloaded from the trunk of the car and unpacked and stored in cupboards, all to sustain a single body.

In American, when I was young, my parents always seemed to be in mourning for something. Now I understand: it must have been the language.

Each day, Shukumar noticed, her beauty, which had once overwhelmed him, seemed to fade. The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.

It (birth) had caused Ruma to acknowledge the supernatural in everyday life. But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now- that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breating and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then in an instant, become absent, invisible.

When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive.

station on Cape Cod looks close to where you are. It's in a place called Wellfleet.

The question has led to a realization: that while the desire to learn a new language is considered admirable, even virtuous, when it comes to writing in a new language, everything changes. Some perceive this desire as a transgression, a betrayal, a deviation.

Belonging to another man and therefore not even a little bit to him.

I became a writer in America, but I set my first stories in Calcutta, a city where I have never lived, far from the country where I grew up, and which I knew much better. Why? Because I needed distance between me and the creative space.

We were all waiting for my father, waiting for him to return and explain, if only by his presence, why we were sitting together drinking tea.

There had been nothing worse than waiting for it to come; the void that followed was easier to bear than the solid weight of those days.

When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. You breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference.

I continue to admit that Italian is not my language, that it's an adopted language I love and use without possession. But I also ask myself: Who possesses a language, and why? Is it a question of lineage? Mastery? Use? Affect? Attachment? What does it mean, in the end, to belong to a language?