Quotes from Jhumpa Lahiri

Solitude demands a precise assessment of time, I've always understood this. It's like the money in your wallet: you have to know how much time you need to kill, how much to spend before dinner, what's left over before going to bed. But time seems different here. My walk took an hour, but to me it felt much longer.

My double, seen from behind, explains something to me: that I'm me and also someone else, that I'm leaving and also staying. This realization momentarily jostles my melancholy, like a current that stirs the branches, that discomfits the leaves of a tree.

She pictures clearly the gray cement floor of her parents' sitting room, feels its solid chill underfoot even on the hottest days. An enormous black-and-white photograph of her deceased paternal grandfather looms at one end against the pink plaster wall;

Throughout the experience, in spite of her growing discomfort, she'd been astonished by her body's ability to make life, exactly as her mother and grandmother and all her great-grandmothers had done. That it was happening so far from home, unmonitored

After a minute they continue on, toward the nurses' station. "Hoping for a boy or a girl?" Patty asks. "As long as there are ten finger and ten toe," Ashima replies.

She had no recollection of crossing a line that drove her to desire a woman's body. With Lorna she found herself already on the other side of it.

Did you have to try for a while?" He thought it a bold question, coming from a stranger. But he was honest with her, his thoughts still loose from the spiked lemonade. "Would you believe, with Maya it happened the first time," he said. He remembered how proud he'd felt, how powerful. The first time in his life he'd had sex without contraception a life had begun.

She prefers books to jewels and saris.

I feel sad as I laugh; I didn't know love at her age. What did I do? I read books and studied. I listened to my parents and did what they asked me to. Even though, in the end, I never made them happy. I didn't like myself, and something told me I'd end up alone.

He had wanted to say to her then, You could unpack some boxes. You could sweep the attic. You could retouch the paint on the bathroom windowsill, and after you do it you could warn me so that I don't put my watch on it.

He was slightly plump, scholarly-looking but still youthful, with black thick-framed glasses and a sharp, prominent nose.

Y, así, esos ocho meses quedan atrás, no tardan en difuminarse, en olvidarse, como esa prenda de ropa que nos ponemos para una celebración especial o que pertenece ya a otra temporada y que con el tiempo acaba resultando engorrosa, prescindible.

The father was a labor officer for the customs department of a shipping company. "My son has been living abroad for two years," the man's father said, "earning a Ph.D. in Boston, researching in the field of fiber optics." Ashima had never heard of Boston, or of fiber optics.

During the first months in Rome, my clandestine Italian diary is the only thing that consoles me, that gives me stability. Often, awake and restless in the middle of the night, I go to the desk to compose some paragraphs in Italian. It's an absolutely secret project. No one suspects, no one knows. I don't recognize the person who is writing in this diary, in this new, approximate language. But I know that it's the most genuine, most vulnerable part of me.

They found a thick tree that had fallen, the tangled roots exposed. They saw the drenched ground that had given way. The tree seemed more overwhelming when it lay on the ground. Its proportions frightening, once it no longer lived.

These patches of disorder make no difference—it is a house too spectacular to suffer distraction, forgiving of oversight and mess.

In the months before coming to Italy, I was looking for another direction for my writing. I wanted a new approach. I didn't know that the language I had studied slowly for many years in America would, finally, give me the direction.

Being rescued from that shattered train had been the first miracle of his life. But here, now, reposing in his arms, weighing next to nothing but changing everything, is the second.

Celui qui n'appartient à aucun lieu spécifique ne peut, en réalité, retourner nulle part.

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.

in August to celebrate an important anniversary of her in-laws. "I wish I didn't have to go, after three days with them I start to lose it." I almost ask: Isn't that the case with your husband and kids, with your house? Isn't that why you're always traveling, why you leave them behind every other week? I don't say this. I'm fond of my friend, I let her blow off steam. The sun beats down on us and chafes the skin below my sweater.

But when I come out of the woods, when I see the basket, scarcely a handful of words remain. The majority disappear. They vanish into thin air, they flow like water between my fingers. Because the basket is memory, and memory betrays me, memory doesn't hold up.

As soon as he comes home from the university the first thing he does is hang up his shirt and trousers, donning a pair of drawstring pajamas and a pullover if it's cold.

Credo che tradurre sia il modo più profondo, più intimo di leggere qualcosa. Una Traduzione è un bellissimo incontro dinamico tra due lingue, due testi, due scrittori. Implica uno sdoppiamento, un rinnovamento. Nel passato amavo tradurre dal latino, dal greco antico, dal bengalese. È stato un modo di avvicinarmi alle diverse lingue, di sentirmi legata ad autori lontanissimi da me, nello spazio e nel tempo.