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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
f9986c8	The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol. "For Gogol Ganguli," it says on the front endpaper in his father's tranquil hand, in red ballpoint ink, the letters rising gradually, optimistically, on the diagonal toward the upper right-hand corner of the page. "The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name" is written within quotation marks."			Jhumpa Lahiri
934426d	Whenever I can, in my study, on the subway, in bed before going to sleep, I immerse myself in Italian. I enter another land, unexplored, murky. A			Jhumpa Lahiri
c52f3da	I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.			Jhumpa Lahiri
3ad453e	Only then, forced at six months to confront his destiny, does he begin to cry.			Jhumpa Lahiri
8010114	He enjoys the passivity of sitting in a classroom again, listening to an instructor, being told what to do. He is reminded of being a student, of a time when his father was still alive.			Jhumpa Lahiri
ee00658	Une langue etrangere, c'est comme un muscle frele, delicat. Si l'on ne s'en sert pas, il s'affaiblit.		language-learning talking	Jhumpa Lahiri
a20ef3b	And yet my lexicon develops without logic, in a darting, fleeting manner. The words appear, accompany me for a while, then, often without warning, abandon me.			Jhumpa Lahiri
7eda60a	So that she began to see herself more clearly, as a thin film of dust was wiped from a sheet of glass.			Jhumpa Lahiri
d086154	What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said.			Jhumpa Lahiri
b7c8ffb	another			Jhumpa Lahiri
d4d8ce0	What she'd done for him, because he'd asked.			Jhumpa Lahiri
3ca8608	They tolerate my mistakes. They correct me, they encourage me, they provide the words I lack. They speak clearly, patiently. Just like parents with their children. The			Jhumpa Lahiri
60cda82	It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words, one after another, unencumbered by his own efforts. In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right with the world, that all struggles were rewarded, that all of life's mistakes made sense in the end. The ..			Jhumpa Lahiri
16f3d1a	People are starving, and this is their solution, he eventually said. They turn victims into criminals. They aim guns at people who can't shoot back.			Jhumpa Lahiri
deb6b3d	avevo bisogno di una lingua differente: una lingua che fosse un luogo di affetto e di riflessione. --ANTONIO TABUCCHI			Jhumpa Lahiri
ef74d76	My wife's name was Mala. The marriage had been arranged by my older brother and his wife. I regarded the proposition with neither objection nor enthusiasm. It was a duty expected of me, as it was expected of every man. She was the daughter of a schoolteacher in Beleghata. I was told that she could cook, knit, embroider, sketch landscapes, and recite poems by Tagore, but these talents could not make up for the fact that she did not possess a..			Jhumpa Lahiri
5a40269	At four Bela was developing a memory. The word yesterday entered her vocabulary, though its meaning was elastic, synonymous with whatever was no longer the case. The past collapsed, in no particular order, contained by a single word.			Jhumpa Lahiri
4e02ec5	She'd told Bela that the feeling would ebb but never fully go away. It would form part of her landscape, wherever she went. She said that her mother's absence would always be present in her thoughts. She told Bela that there would never be an answer for why she'd gone.			Jhumpa Lahiri
2ec7549	The next time she visits her father she'll speak to him in English. Were her mother ever to stand before her, even if Bela could choose any language on earth in which to speak, she would have nothing to say. But no, that's not true. She remains in constant communication with her. 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
2170456	He regretted his surliness when she had refused. She was the only person he'd met in his adult life who had any understanding of his past, the only woman he wanted to remain connected to. He didn't want to leave it up to chance to find her again, didn't want to share her with another man. That last day in Volterra he had searched for a way to tell her these things. She had not accused him, as Franca had, of his own cowardice, of his inabili..			Jhumpa Lahiri
1adc9ec	No more bells ringing in the middle of the afternoon demolishing the rest of the day. No more waiting for the situation to change.		waiting	Jhumpa Lahiri
5de4b48	Bilmezlik ve umut icinde gonullu bir beklenti hali... Iste boyle yasiyordu cogu insan.		lowland saçında-gün-ışığı roman	Jhumpa Lahiri
4fd2431	Even though I now speak the language fairly well, the spoken language doesn't help me. A conversation involves a sort of collaboration and, often, an act of forgiveness. When I speak I can make mistakes, but I'm somehow able to make myself understood. On the page I am alone. The spoken language is a kind of antechamber with respect to the written, which has a stricter, more elusive logic.			Jhumpa Lahiri
05eb404	Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he can not conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile ..			Jhumpa Lahiri
d144fa7	It's not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband's name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying Ashoke's name, she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as "Are you listening to me?" --			Jhumpa Lahiri
20a105f	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..			Jhumpa Lahiri
dbcc8f6	Eventually he begins to practice his new signature in the margins of the paper. He tries it in various styles, his hand unaccustomed to the angles of the N, the dotting of the two i's. He wonders how many times he has written his old name, at the top of how many tests and quizzes, how many homework assignments, how many yearbook inscriptions to friends. How many times does a person write his name in a lifetime - a million? Two million?		names the-namesake	Jhumpa Lahiri
3cd8b66	The view induces the opposite of vertigo, a lurching feeling inspired not by gravity's pull to earth, but by the infinite reaches of heaven.			Jhumpa Lahiri
4ae21b0	In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another.			Jhumpa Lahiri
6263e5c	It made him shy, they way he felt the first time they stood together in a mirror.			Jhumpa Lahiri
d72a45b	He has no ABCD friends at college. He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share.			Jhumpa Lahiri
4e17647	Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge--she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind. It was easier to turn her back on the two countries that could claim her in favor of one that had no claim whatsoever.		immigration language	Jhumpa Lahiri
f0c549c	Without language you can't feel that you have a legitimate, respected presence. You are without a voice, without power.		language-barrier	Jhumpa Lahiri
5f965f1	Ashima feels lonely suddenly, horribly, permanently alone, and briefly, turned away from the mirror, she sobs for her husband. She feels overwhelmed by the thought of the move she is about to make, to the city that was once home and is now in its own way foreign. She feels both impatience and indifference for all the days she still must live, for something tells her she will not go quickly as her husband did. For thirty-three years she miss..			Jhumpa Lahiri
82dba84	Kaushik, what about a picture?" my father suggested. I shook my head. I had left my camera, my father's old Yashica, at school. "But you always have it with you." That look of irritated disappointment, the one that had appeared the day my mother died and was missing now that he'd married Chitra, passed briefly across my father's face. "I forgot it," I said. It was true, I did always have the camera with me. Even on quiet weekends when I cam..			Jhumpa Lahiri
a38b82c	tour guide tells them that after the Taj was completed, each of the builders, twenty-two thousand men, had his thumbs cut off so that the structure could never be built again.			Jhumpa Lahiri
a1e93ee	Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again. The			Jhumpa Lahiri
69584a3	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,		past memory	Jhumpa Lahiri
c23dbe9	given that she barely saw her father, given that she continued to measure out her contact with him, whether to deny herself or to deny him, she could not be sure.			Jhumpa Lahiri
bb4db01	That year, and every year, it seemed, we began by studying the Revolutionary War. We were taken in school buses on field trips to visit Plymouth Rock, and to walk the Freedom Trail, and to climb to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument. We made dioramas out of colored construction paper depicting George Washington crossing the choppy waters of the Delaware River, and we made puppets of King George wearing white tights and a black bow in his h..			Jhumpa Lahiri
5de834a	I realize that it's impossible to know a foreign language perfectly. For			Jhumpa Lahiri
eb1ea76	In the end the boy had died one evening in his mother's arms, his limbs burning with fever, but then there was the funeral to pay for, and the other children who were born soon enough, and the newer, bigger house, and the good schools and tutors, and the fine shoes and the television, and the countless other ways he tried to console his wife and to keep her from crying in her sleep, and so when the doctor offered to pay him twice as much as..			Jhumpa Lahiri
6ac0cac	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..			Jhumpa Lahiri
1dcd5d1	Back then she had only wanted to shut the door to it, to be apart from Subhash and Bela. She'd been incapable of cherishing what she'd had.			Jhumpa Lahiri

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