Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes
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You remind me of everything that followed.
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And yet he had loved her. A Bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She'd been prepared to live her life alone but from the moment he'd known her he'd needed her.
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He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past.
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Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do.
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On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of unfamiliar trees into which East Pakistani refugees had fled, seeking safety over the Indian border.
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I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I don't want in my life right now.
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Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night.
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She has given birth to vagabonds. She is the keeper of all these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember.
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Do what I will never do.
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Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.
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She is stunned that in this town there are no sidewalks to speak of, no streetlights, no public transportation, no stores for miles at at a time.
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That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together.
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Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.
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The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.
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She has the gift of accepting her life.
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Sexy means loving someone you donot know.
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I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.
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Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people's lives, though all of it, she thinks, was previously wanted, once useful. She feels the sun scorching the back of her neck. The heat is at its worst now, the rains still a few months away. The task satisfies her. It passes the time.
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The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.
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Amid the gray, an incongruous band of daytime blue asserts itself. To the west, a pink sun already begins its descent. The effect is of three isolated aspects, distinct phases of the day. All of it, strewn across the horizon, is contained in his vision.
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Pet names are a persistant 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.
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Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying 'Listen to me'.
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The sky was different, without color, taut and unforgiving. But the water was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times, cold enough, I knew, to kill me, violent enough to break me apart. The waves were immense, battering rocky beaches without sand. The farther I went, the more desolate it became, more than any place I'd been, but for this very reason the landscape drew me, claimed me as nothing had in a long time.
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I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.