Quotes by Jhumpa Lahiri

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

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.

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.

There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding.

The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters—it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too soon and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.

Thats the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.

My grandfather says thats what books are for, Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. To travel without moving an inch.

When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don’t want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity.

He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where hed landed and made his life, was not his,

But even as she was going through with it she knew it was useless, just as it was useless to save a single earring when the other half of the pair was lost

...that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents.

But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible.

He still had the power to stagger her at timessimply the fact that he was breathing that all his organs were in their proper places that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born.

I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a non-existent one.

...American book jackets reflect the spirit of country - little homogeneity, lots of diversity.

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

Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.

She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life, only to strip it bare. Only to be alone in the end. Her life had been paired down to its solitary components.

A woman who had fallen out of love with her life

Those who dont belong to any specific place cant, in fact, return anywhere.