When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away. Jhumpa Lahiri Read Quote
If you grow up in a place, and you’re small, even if the place is itself also small, it’s huge to you. It’s what’s out there: it’s the world outside of your door. Jhumpa Lahiri Read Quote
My father encouraged me to work in the library, just because it was the world that he knew. But I also wanted to do it. I also wanted to work in the library and be part of the library somehow, because it represented a world that really wasn’t represented in my home, and I wanted it to be. Jhumpa Lahiri Read Quote
I always wanted to grow up in a house full of books, English books, and I wanted the sort of fireplaces that worked, overstuffed chairs, that whole kind of fantasy of a bookish New England life. So the library gave me that; for the hours that I was there, I was surrounded by that atmosphere that I craved in my life. Jhumpa Lahiri Read Quote
I think one of the things that attracted me about theater and the stage was the ability to escape reality. And that is what I do in my work as a writer, but in a different way. And the freedom to put your own existence on ice and become another person. Jhumpa Lahiri Read Quote
I think there are a lot of misconceptions on both sides, the developing vs. the developed world, especially about America. I’ve felt the frustration in my lack of belonging to any one place, but I’ve also felt it liberating to be able to appreciate something without feeling disloyal to my own culture. Jhumpa Lahiri Read Quote
Literature is such a profound and deep way to look into someone else’s life, his mind, his hopes and thoughts. Books have opened so many doors for me, taking me to places where my normal life and its finite limits could never have. Jhumpa Lahiri Read Quote
Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I’m also more exposed. Jhumpa Lahiri Read Quote
I think it’s the small things, the smaller episodes and details that I linger on and try to draw meaning from, just personally. Jhumpa Lahiri Read Quote
My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door. Jhumpa Lahiri Read Quote
