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But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy.

Jhumpa Lahiri

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Jhumpa Lahiri
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: July 11
Academic
Actor
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Jūmpā Lāhīrī
Nilanjana Svadeshna Lahiri
Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri
Jhumba Lahiri
Hands
Affection
Bikinis
Street
Cambridge
Americans
Gathered
Streets
Declaration
Hand
Privacy
Public
Holding
Miniskirts
Lying
Spite
Namesake
Common
Prefer
Declarations

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Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table.
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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.
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You remind me of everything that followed.
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I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.
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Isolation offered its own form of companionship
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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.
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That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together.
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When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.
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If I stop to think about fans, or best-selling, or not best-selling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It's like staring at the mirror all day.
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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.
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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.
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She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.
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Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.
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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.
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Do what I will never do.
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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.
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There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding.
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