Quote

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.

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
Persons
Handful
Person
Magical
Real
Affect
Artfully
Thing
Dimensions
Specificity
Things
Stop
Conjure
Time
Situation
Arranged
People
Words
Profoundly
Place
Alter

More quotes by Jhumpa Lahiri

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I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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...that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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Try to remember it always, he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying 'Listen to me'.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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That's what books are for... to travel without moving an inch.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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She watched his lips forming the words, at the same time she heard them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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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Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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You remind me of everything that followed.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before
Jhumpa Lahiri
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In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, 'Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?' I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters-it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too son and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.
Jhumpa Lahiri