“Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“Isolation offered its own form of companionship”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“And yet he had loved her. A Bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She'd been prepared to live her life alone but from the moment he'd known her he'd needed her.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold. Blindly planning for it, envisioning things that weren't the case. This was the working of the will. This was what gave the world purpose and direction. Not what was there but what was not.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“With her own hand she'd painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war,”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“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.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“...learning was an act of rediscovery, knowledge a form of remembering.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the word for yesterday, kal, was also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali one needed an adjective, or relied on the tense of a verb, to distinguish what had already happened from what would be.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it would.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“Nor was her love for Udayan recognizable or intact. Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging through her like some helplessly mating pair of insects. Anger at him for dying when he might have lived. For bringing her happiness, and then taking it away. For trusting her, only to betray her. For believing in sacrifice, only to be so selfish in the end.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“Everything in Bela's life has been a reaction. I am who I am, she would say, I live as I do because of you.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“Too much information, and yet, in her case, not enough. In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“I don't know, he said, handing her the ticket. He'd been standing there all the while on the sidewalk, waiting for her. Waiting, until they were in the darkness of the theatre, to take her hand.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“Writing down call numbers with short pencils, searching up and down aisles that would turn dark when the timers on the lights expired. She recalls, visually, certain passages in the books she'd read. Which side of the book, where on the page.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“The imperfection became a mark of distinction about their home. Something visitors noticed, the first family anecdote that was told.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night. She had no wish to overcome it. Rather, it was something upon which she’d come to depend, with which she’d entered by now into a relationship, more satisfying and enduring than the relationships she’d experienced in either of her marriages.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“Plato says the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“Amid the gray, an incongruous band of daytime blue asserts itself. To the west, a pink sun already begins its descent. The effect is of three isolated aspects, distinct phases of the day. All of it, strewn across the horizon, is contained in his vision.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“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, quote from The Lowland
“Time flowed for Bela in the opposite direction. The day after yesterday, she sometimes said. Pronounced slightly differently, Bela’s name, the name of a flower, was itself the word for a span of time, a portion of the day. Shakal bela meant morning; bikel bela, afternoon. Ratrir bela was night. Bela’s yesterday was a receptacle for anything her mind stored. Any experience or impression that had come before. Her memory was brief, its contents limited. Lacking chronology, randomly rearranged.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“He saw that his mother was dwelling in an alternate time, a more bearable reality.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“When Deepa poured Bela some water from the urn that stood on a little stool, in the corner of the room, her grandmother reproached her.
Not that water. Give her the boiled water. She’s not made to survive here.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance. On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguished day from night, that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening and diminishing, something neither alive nor dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away. In one of her notebooks from Calcutta were jottings in Udayan’s hand, on the laws of classical physics. Newton’s theory that time was an absolute entity, a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. Einstein’s contribution, that time and space were intertwined. He’d described it in terms of particles, velocities. A system of relations among instantaneous events. Something called time”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
“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.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, quote from The Lowland
Jhumpa Lahiri
Born place: in London (England), The United Kingdom
Born date July 11, 1967
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“Sometimes the idol does not fall all at once. And sometimes when he breaks, people devour the pieces.”
― Eduardo Galeano, quote from Soccer in Sun and Shadow
“I wanted you to have the best pears in New York and I wanted to be the man to buy them for you.”
― Judith McNaught, quote from Someone to Watch Over Me
“Everyone wishes their life were happier.”
Lily shook her head. “No. Not like beautiful people. They walk this earth, their chin up to the rest of us, and think that great happiness, great love, great joy is their right and their prerogative. Passion as the entitlement of the beautiful, the way power is the entitlement of the rich.” Lily paused. “Especially when it comes to love. Beauty and love become somehow synonymous. How can plain people have great love? They can’t, that’s how. They can have average love, mediocre love, but their hearts can’t soar. Only beautiful hearts can soar.”
“I think you’ve hit on the nail right there,” said Spencer. “Beautiful people don’t necessarily have beautiful hearts.”
“But it doesn’t matter, don’t you see? You don’t fall in love with a heart. You fall in love with a woman’s face, with her body, with her hair, with her smell. That’s first, everything else is secondary. My mother’s beauty when she was young was so extreme that she didn’t understand how every man who met her didn’t love her in extremis.”
― Paullina Simons, quote from The Girl In Times Square
“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.
... In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves.' For in this love 'to divide is not to take away.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from The Four Loves
“One more thing. She wears Patchouli. Every tart in Montmartre wears it. Place Pigalle reeks of it. If she wants to carry out her pose as an aristocrat, she ought to refine her tastes.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Luncheon of the Boating Party
Proces
The Dark Wife
I Am Malala: How One...
The Faerie Guardian
Sprig Muslin
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