Quotes from Jhumpa Lahiri

My mother, by now, clings to life like a yellowing piece of Scotch tape in a scrapbook. It can detach at any moment, and yet it still does the job. All you need to do is turn the page to unstick it, so that it leaves a pale rectangular stain behind. I'm not impressed by what I've just written, it feels overwrought, but I hold on to the receipt.

He has no ABCD friends at college. 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 him, but because of a past they happen to share.

Like Udayan, Bela is nowhere. Her name in the search engine leads to nothing... It doesn't mean anything, necessarily. Only that Bela doesn't exist in the dimension where Gauri might learn something about her. Only that she refuses Gauri that access.

Moushumi smiles as she always smiles for a camera, her mouth closed, her head tilted slightly downward and to the left.

It all happens in a matter of seconds: the sphere, so precise at the start, emerges, perfectly round, like an egg yolk that then slips from its shell.

Writing in another language reactivates the grief of being between two worlds, of being on the outside. Of feeling alone and excluded.

That vast and vaporous territory, lacking precise pathways, is all that binds us together now. But it never preserves our tracks. The sky, unlike the sea, never holds on to the people that pass through it. The sky contains nothing of our spirit, it doesn't care. Always shifting, altering its aspect from one moment to the next, it can't be defined.

Until now Ashima has accepted that there is no one to sweep the floor, or do the dishes, or wash clothes, or shop for groceries, or prepare a meal on the days she is tired or homesick or cross. She has accepted that the very lack of such amenities is the American way.

Other Bengalis gossiped about him and prayed their own children would not ruin their lives in the same way. And so he became what all parents feared, a blot, a failure, someone who was not contributing to the grand circle of accomplishments Bengali children were making across the country, as surgeons or attorneys or scientists, or writing articles for the front page of The New York Times.

Like the rest of their Bengali friends, [Gogol's] parents expect him to be, if not an engineer, then a doctor, a lawyer, an economist at the very least. These were the fields that brought them to America, his father repeatedly reminds him, the professions that have earned them security and respect.

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

as they near his apartment, he leans toward the plexiglass and says to the driver, in Bengali, 'It's that one, up on the right.' The driver turns around, surprised, smiling. 'I didn't realize,' he says. 'That's okay,' Gogol says, reaching for his wallet. He tips the driver excessively and steps out of the car.

Books come to stand for various episodes in our lives, for certain idealisms, follies of belief, moments of love. Along the way they accumulate our marks, our stains, our innocent abuses—they come to wear our experience of them on their covers and bindings like wrinkles on our skin.

The sunlight on her hair.

The Brothers Karamazov, and Anna Karenina, and Fathers and Sons.

And for the first time in his life, another man's name upset Gogol more than his own.

Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.

My parents' relationship with Kolkata is so strong. Growing up, the absence of Kolkata was always present in our lives.

Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India.

I'm always intrigued by authors who say, 'This book took 17 drafts.' They're very clear about it. I couldn't possibly count the number of times... So many of these stories I worked on for a very long time and wrote them, set them aside, rewrote them, worked on something else - they were never far from reach; they informed each other.

As a child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. Growing up, I was impatient with my parents for being so different, holding on to India the way they did, and always making me feel like I had to make a choice of which way I would go.

Everything has to be reconsidered, shaped anew. Autobiographical fiction, even if it is inspired by reality, by memory, requires a rigorous selection, a merciless cutting. One writes with the pen, but in the end, to create the right form, one has to use, like Matisse, a good pair of scissors.

I turn melancholy when I lie out in the sun. I mourn my unhappy origins. I feel sad for my mother, frustrated as a wife, disdainful now that she's a widow.

Why Italian? In order to develop another pair of eyes, in order to experiment with weakness