Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go. - Jhumpa Lahiri

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.

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.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that a cover is a sort of translation, that is, an interpretation of my words in another language — a visual one. It represents the text, but isn't part of it. It can't be too literal. It has to have its own take on the book.

Like a translation, a cover can be faithful to at the book, or it can be misleading. In theory, like a translation, it should be in the service of the book, but this dynamic isn't always the case.