Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever... this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.' All the details get watered down but don't quite disappear.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

... American book jackets reflect the spirit of country - little homogeneity, lots of diversity.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

A woman who had fallen out of love with her life

— Jhumpa Lahiri

Belonging to another man and therefore not even a little bit to him.

— 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

But even as she was going through with it, she knew it was useless, just as it was useless to save a single earring when the other half of the pair was lost

— Jhumpa Lahiri

But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of his dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day. The difference was so extreme that he could not accommodate the two places together in his mind. In this enormous new country, there seemed to be nowhere for the old to reside. There was nothing to link them; he was the sole link. Here life ceased to obstruct or assault him. Here was a place where humanity was not always pushing, rushing, running as if with a fire at its back

— Jhumpa Lahiri

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he'd landed and made his life, was not his,

— Jhumpa Lahiri

He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera.

— Jhumpa Lahiri