Jhumpa Lahiri quote: "From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme."

The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Isolation offered its own form of companionship
JHUMPA LAHIRI

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

I feel partly American, but I have an ambiguous relation with both America and India, the only two c...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

A lot of my personality was informed by feeling very different in the world I grew up in, feeling th...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

The essential dilemma of my life is between my deep desire to belong and my suspicion of belonging.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I think, like any artist or any writer, I just want to have that pure freedom of expression and of t...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it's an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father ca...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of wha...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I have two young children, and I will say that motherhood is its own peak, just like in the process ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant,...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced Engl...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I think it's the small things, the smaller episodes and details that I linger on and try to draw...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

You can't have a hit every time. The main thing is to keep on working and not be afraid to take ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, wh...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I think that what I have been truly searching for as a person, as a writer, as a thinker, as a daugh...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

This story is based on a gentleman who indeed did... used to come to my parents' house in 1971 f...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I find it really liberating to be in a place where I am a foreigner in every way. I've lived wit...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of unfami...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I've gained a lot from James Joyce, Tolstoy, Chekhov and R. K. Narayan. While writing, I try to ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

It took me a long time to even dare to envision myself as a writer. I was very uncertain and hesitan...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a p...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an acce...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My n...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters—it was something about the way they carried ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will t...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold. Blindly...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I think if you speak to any creative person, there's something so powerful - so intoxicating, if...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

On the technical side, I hope that my writing is evolving and maturing, ripening, deepening.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I'm always intrigued by authors who say, 'This book took 17 drafts.' They're very cl...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I have two passports because I have to have at least one, and I really don't know how I define m...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I think there are a lot of misconceptions on both sides, the developing vs. the developed world, esp...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I had been learning Italian for years. I always loved Latin, but Italian is a living language; I'...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one anoth...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocea...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

It was important to me to become day-to-day fluent and functional in another language, and about 10 ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They w...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabl...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was so...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

He saw that his mother was dwelling in an alternate time, a more bearable reality.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people’s lives, though all of it, s...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

When Deepa poured Bela some water from the urn that stood on a little stool, in the corner of the ro...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Time flowed for Bela in the opposite direction. The day after yesterday, she sometimes said. Pronoun...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Plato says the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tr...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

The imperfection became a mark of distinction about their home. Something visitors noticed, the firs...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Writing down call numbers with short pencils, searching up and down aisles that would turn dark when...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I don't know, he said, handing her the ticket. He'd been standing there all the while on the sidewal...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Too much information, and yet, in her case, not enough. In a world of diminishing mystery, the unkno...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Everything in Bela's life has been a reaction. I am who I am, she would say, I live as I do because ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Nor was her love for Udayan recognizable or intact. Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging throu...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it wo...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the wo...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

...learning was an act of rediscovery, knowledge a form of remembering.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart an...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war,
JHUMPA LAHIRI

With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before
JHUMPA LAHIRI

With her own hand she'd painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

And yet he had loved her. A Bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She'd be...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tr...
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...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I've always been searching to arrive at a certain voice that will probably elude me forever.
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I think about the structure, sure. I think about what's going to happen, and how it's going ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

On weekdays, as soon as she picked Bela from the bus stop and brought her home, she went straight in...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new worl...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each pe...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I recently discovered the work of Giorgio Manganelli, who wrote a collection called 'Centuria,&#...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I'm from Kingston, R.I., sort of on the University of Rhode Island campus - on the margins of th...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so f...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount t...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fict...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

If you look at my characters as a group, they all have a different relationship with the way that pl...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Even printed, on pages that are bound, sentences remain unsettled organisms. Years later, I can alwa...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time whil...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the b...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to la...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking too much abo...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI

It imparts a certain momentum to nuclear negotiations with the US. France has played a significant r...
DILIP LAHIRI

There is a great deal of French interest in India now that must still be converted into action on th...
DILIP LAHIRI

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

Jhumpa Lahiri

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