Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance. On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguished day from night, that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening and diminishing, something neither alive nor dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away. In one of her notebooks from Calcutta were jottings in Udayan’s hand, on the laws of classical physics. Newton’s theory that time was an absolute entity, a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. Einstein’s contribution, that time and space were intertwined. He’d described it in terms of particles, velocities. A system of relations among instantaneous events. Something called time

Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people’s lives, though all of it, she thinks, was previously wanted, once useful. She feels the sun scorching the back of her neck. The heat is at its worst now, the rains still a few months away. The task satisfies her. It passes the time.

And she refused to go to that miserable place he had dragged her to so many times, to hope for a thing that was unchangeable.

Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.

They don't understand why I want to take such a risk. These reactions don't surprise me. A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening.

The only way to even begin to understand language is to love it so much that we allow it to confound us and to torment us to the extent that it threatens to swallow us whole.

She prefers books to jewels and saris. She believes as I do.

Depression” was a foreign word to them, an American thing. In their opinion their children were immune from the hardships and injustices they had left behind in India, as if the inoculations the pediatrician had given Sudha and Rahul when they were babies guaranteed them an existence free of suffering.

It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words, one after another, unencumbered by his own efforts. In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right with the world, that all struggles were rewarded, that all of life's mistakes made sense in the end. The promise that he would hear from Mrs. Das now filled him with the same belief.

I think it's a hesitant book and at the same time bold. A text both private and public. On the one hand it springs from my other books. The themes, ultimately, are unchanged: identity, alienation, belonging. But the wrapping, the contents, the body and soul are transfigured.

Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he can not conquer. 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 not the first. 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.

He regretted only one thing: that he had not met her sooner, that he had not known her every day of his life.

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

Books come to stand for various episodes in our lives, for certain idealisms, follies of belief, moments of love. Along the way they accumulate our marks, our stains, our innocent abuses—they come to wear our experience of them on their covers and bindings like wrinkles on our skin.

yet I know that expressing oneself necessarily means being different. The writer's voice is a singular one, solitary. Art is nothing other than the freedom to express oneself in any language, in whatever manner, dressed any which way.