He still had the power to stagger her at times simply the fact that he was breathing that all his organs were in their proper places that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

I don't know why, but the older I get, the more interested I get in my parents' marriage. And it's interesting to be married yourself, too, because there is an inevitable comparison.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

If you look at my characters as a group, they all have a different relationship with the way that places can signify emotion in them - and the way those bonds can be shattered.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

I'm bound to fail when I write in Italian, but unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn't torment or grieve me.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.

— Jhumpa Lahiri

In their silence they continued both to protect me and to punish me. The memory of that night was now the only tie between us, eclipsing everything else.

— Jhumpa Lahiri