Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“And yet she could not forgive herself. Even as an adult, she wished only that she could go back and change things: the ungainly things she’d worn, the insecurity she’d felt, all the innocent mistakes she made.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“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.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“The thought of Christmas overwhelms him. He no longer looks forward to the holiday; he wants only to be on the other side of the season. His impatience makes him feel that he is incontrovertibly, finally, an adult.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, “Listen to me.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“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.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“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.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“Sexy means loving someone you donot know.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying 'Listen to me'.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“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.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“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.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold. Blindly planning for it, envisioning things that weren't the case. This was the working of the will. This was what gave the world purpose and direction. Not what was there but what was not.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“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.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“Do what I will never do.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters-it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too son and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“For that story, I took as my subject a young woman whom I got to know over the course of a couple of visits. I never saw her having any health problems - but I knew she wanted to be married.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri -
“On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in bowl.”
-- Jhumpa Lahiri
