Quotes by Jhumpa Lahiri

About Jhumpa Lahiri:

Jhumpa Lahiri is an Indian Bengali American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna but goes by her nickname (or in Bengali, her "Daak naam") Jhumpa. Lahiri is a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President Barack Obama. Her book The Lowland, published in 2013, was a nominee for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. Lahiri is currently a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A woman who had fallen out of love with her life

Jhumpa Lahiri

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 seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am n...

Jhumpa Lahiri

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

Jhumpa Lahiri

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

Jhumpa Lahiri

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

Jhumpa Lahiri

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

Jhumpa Lahiri

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 and fall of the wind, he could hear his father's lau...

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

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...

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

Eventually he begins to practice his new signature in the margins of the paper. He tries it in various styles, his hand unaccustomed to the angles of the N, the dotting of the two i's. He wonders how many times he has written his old name, at the top...

Jhumpa Lahiri

Lying in his parents' house, in the middle of the night, she told him the whole story, about meeting Dimitri on a bus, finding his resume in the bin. She confessed that Dimitri had gone with her to Palm Beach. One by one he stored the pieces of infor...

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

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.

Jhumpa Lahiri

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

Jhumpa Lahiri

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 difference was so extreme that he could not accommod...

Jhumpa Lahiri

She'd convinced herself that Subhash was her rival, and that she was in competition for him for Bela, a competition that felt insulting, unjust. But of course it had not been a competition, it had been her own squandering. Her own withdrawal, covert,...

Jhumpa Lahiri

This was the woman Narasimhan had married, as opposed to whatever girl from Madras his family wanted for him. Subhash wondered how his family reacted to her. He wondered if she'd ever been to India. If she had, he wondered whether she'd liked it or h...

Jhumpa Lahiri

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

Jhumpa Lahiri

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 measured out the nightly cup of rice, letting it soak in...

Jhumpa Lahiri

Author Bio

  • NameJhumpa Lahiri
  • DescriptionShort story writer, novelist
  • BornJuly 11, 1967
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionNovelist; Writer
  • WorksInterpreter Of Maladies; The Namesake
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Pulitzer Prize For Fiction; O. Henry Award