When I write in Italian, I think in Italian; to translate into English, I have to wake up another part of my brain. I don’t like the sensation at all. I feel alienated. As if I’d run into a boyfriend I’d tired of, someone I’d left years earlier. He no longer appeals to me.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

And so the eight months are put behind them, quickly shed, quickly forgotten, like clothes worn for a special occasion, or for a season that has passed, suddenly cumbersome, irrelevant to their lives.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

I have terrible urges, Mr. Kapasi, to throw things away. One day I had the urge to throw everything I own out the window, the television, the children, everything. Don’t you think it’s unhealthy?

— Jhumpa Lahiri

He looked at her, in her red plaid skirt and strawberry T-shirt, a woman not yet thirty, who loved neither her husband nor her children, who had already fallen out of love with life.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me – everything that makes me react, in short – I have to put it into words.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk. In the end I realise that it wasn’t a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

And 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.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

If the process of writing is a dream, the book cover represents the awakening.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

Is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt?

— Jhumpa Lahiri

Things were different now, of course; those solitary hours he’d once savored had become a prison for him, a commonplace.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day’s headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her from breaking news to articles archived years ago. At every moment the past is there, appended to the present. It’s a version of Bela’s definition, in childhood, of yesterday.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

Personally, I think it deplorable to place the words and opinions of others on the book jacket. I want the first words read by the reader of my book to be written by me.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

In the face of everything that seems to me unattainable, I marvel. Without a sense of marvel at things, without wonder, one can’t create anything.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

Even those family members who continue to live seem dead somehow, always invisible, impossible to touch.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

When I write in Italian, I think in Italian; to translate into English, I have to wake up another part of my brain. I don’t like the sensation at all. I feel alienated. As if I’d run into a boyfriend I’d tired of, someone I’d left years earlier. He no longer appeals to me.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

Why, as an adult, as a writer, am I interested in this new relationship with imperfection? What does it offer me? I would say a stunning clarity, a more profound self-awareness. Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

The unknown words remind me that there’s a lot I don’t know in this world.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

I believe that reading in a foreign language is the most intimate way of reading.

— Jhumpa Lahiri
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