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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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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
Feels
Novel
Collection
Going
Seen
Collections
Like
Story
Hasn
Stories
Novels
Seems
Grown
Back
Finished
Take
Build
Dredging
Feel
Seem
Occurred

More quotes by Jhumpa Lahiri

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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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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.
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War will bring the revolution revolution will stop the war.
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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.
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.
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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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The thought of Christmas overwhelms him. He no longer looks forward to the holiday he wants only to be on the other side of the season. His impatience makes him feel that he is incontrovertibly, finally, an adult.
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A writer has to true to him or herself. Period. That’s it!
Jhumpa Lahiri
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With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before
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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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Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do.
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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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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She had listened to him, partly sympathetic, partly horrified. For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family's heritage, another to hear it from him.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
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