Quotes by 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 ...”

“With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before”

“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 b...”

“Belonging to another man and therefore not even a little bit to him.”

“In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”

“In their silence they continued both to protect me and to punish me. The memory of that night was now the only tie between us, eclipsing everything else.”

“But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of his dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day. The...”

“Will you remember this day, Gogol?" his father had asked, turning back to look at him, his hands pressed like earmuffs to either side of his head. "How long do I have to remember it?" Over the rise...”

“I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you.”

“There was the focus of seeking pleasure, and the numbing effect, once they were finished, removing all specific thoughts from her brain. It ushered in the solid, dreamless sleep that otherwise elud...”

“I owed the greater apology, but at the same time I knew that was done was done, that no matter what I said now I would never be able to make it right.”

“On weekdays, as soon as she picked Bela from the bus stop and brought her home, she went straight into the kitchen, washing up the morning dishes she'd ignored, then getting dinner started. She mea...”

“She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.”

“The blood of too many, dissolving the very stain.”

“While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to...”

“Nor was her love for Udayan recognizable or intact. Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging through her like some helplessly mating pair of insects. Anger at him for dying when he might have liv...”

“I'm bound to fail when I write in Italian, but unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn't torment or grieve me.”

“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...”

“Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever... this is why we have this last name, why...”

“In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their...”