I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there's Italian, this strange, other component of me that I've just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Categorized in : Me Myself I Am Mind

That's what books are for... to travel without moving an inch.

Jhumpa Lahiri

book travel moving

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

inspiring motivational travel

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.

Jhumpa Lahiri

style personality book

Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.

Jhumpa Lahiri

mind way fiction

It is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

Jhumpa Lahiri

dimensions real people

A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing

Jhumpa Lahiri

imperfect-things imperfect rich

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

next stories want

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

bangs cameras missing

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

meals imagination ordinary

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

silence night promise

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

Jhumpa Lahiri

namesake regret world

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

childhood names people

Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.

Jhumpa Lahiri

namesake echoes news

We are all #humans and we all make #mistakes. We #hurt people even if we don't want to.

Jhumpa Lahiri

hurt mistake people

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

Jhumpa Lahiri

embrace book firsts

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

writing mean reality

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

insecurity mistake life

The sky was different, without color, taut and unforgiving. But the water was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times, cold enough, I knew, to kill me, violent enough to break me apart. The waves were immense, battering rocky beaches without sand. The farther I went, the more desolate it became, more than any place I'd been, but for this very reason the landscape drew me, claimed me as nothing had in a long time.

Jhumpa Lahiri

color sky beach

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

Jhumpa Lahiri

clothes parent names

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

lifetime impossible trying