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19e5617
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Things were different now, of course; those solitary hours he'd once savored had become a prison for him, a commonplace.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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8decb94
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But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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283d94b
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She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day's headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her from breaking news to articles archived years ago. At every moment the past is there, appended to the present. It's a version of Bela's definition, in childhood, of yesterday.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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280adf8
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The effort flops like a just-caught fish inside her. A brief burst of possibility as the name is typed onto the screen, as she clicks to activate the search. Hope thrashing in the process of turning cold.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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ebc5a01
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The Greeks had had no clear notion of it. For them the future had been indeterminable. In Aristotle's teaching, a man could never say for certain if there would be a sea battle tomorrow.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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fd41b79
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Avoiding puddles, stepping over mats of hyacinth leaves that remained in place. Breathing the dank air.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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7d31209
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He stops to wait for her, but she has a sudden burst of energy, passing him. On and on she sprints, unobstructed, kicking up her heels at the water's edge. Dark hair to her chin, rearranged by the wind, obscuring her face. Just when he thinks she will have the energy to run forever, to escape his sight, she pauses. Turning back, breathing hard, her hand on her hip, making sure he is there.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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1d78a7f
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It was Durga Pujo, the city's most anticipated days. The stores, the sidewalks, were overflowing. At the ends of certain alleys, or in gaps among buildings, she saw the pandals. Durga armed with her weapons, flanked by her four children, depicted and worshiped in so many versions. Made of plaster, made of clay. She was resplendent, formidable. A lion helped to conquer the demon at her feet. She was a daughter visiting her family, visiting t..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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d8c2c74
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Subhash was angry with himself for going along with it. For still needing to prove he could. He was sick of the fear that always rose up in him: that he would cease to exist, and that he and Udayan would cease to be brothers, were Subhash to resist him.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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2d7a4c0
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What had Subhash told Bela, to keep her away? Nothing, probably. It was the just punishment for her crime. She understood now what it meant to walk away from her child. It had been her own act of killing. A connection she had severed, resulting in a death that applied only to the two of them. It was a crime worse than anything Udayan had committed. She had never written to Bela. Never dared reach out, to reassure her. What reassurance was h..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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cfae0d2
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It was that she had already fallen in love, and been married, and had a child, and had her heart broken. He had yet to experience any of those things.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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cdf0541
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Years ago, Dr. Grant had helped her to put what she felt into words. 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.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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9d21f01
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Glowing screens, increasingly foldable, portable, companionable, anticipating any possible question the human brain might generate.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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3961cf6
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had never traveled alone before and I discovered that I liked it. No one in the world knew where I was, no one had the ability to reach me. It was like being dead, my escape allowing me to taste that tremendous power my mother possessed forever.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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0f71e84
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On weekdays, as soon as she picked Bela from the bus stop and brought her home, she went straight into the kitchen, washing up the morning dishes she'd ignored, then getting dinner started. She measured out the nightly cup of rice, letting it soak in a pan on the counter. She peeled onions and potatoes and picked through lentils and prepared another night's dinner, then fed Bela. She was never able to understand why this relatively unchalle..
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motherhood
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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89f8c81
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She'd convinced herself that Subhash was her rival, and that she was in competition for him for Bela, a competition that felt insulting, unjust. But of course it had not been a competition, it had been her own squandering. Her own withdrawal, covert, ineluctable. With her own hand she'd painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether
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withdrawn
self-sabotage
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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42e4664
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Be sure to keep my ruby choker and the pearl and emerald set for the person you will marry," she said during one of these walks. "I'm not planning on getting married any time soon," I told her, and she said that she wished she could say the same for dying. Ultimately, I disobeyed her. After she was gone I was unable to open up and examine the contents of all those flat red boxes she'd kept hidden in a suitcase on her closet shelf, never min..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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6dd7fbc
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Sang had got down on all fours and crawled into Farouk's coat closet, weeping uncontrollably, at one point hitting herself with a shoe. She'd refused to emerge from the closet until the policeman lifted her by the armpits and dragged her forcefully from the apartment, telling Paul to see her home. Tiny pieces of flower petals and leaves were still stuck in her hair. She had taken Paul's hand in the elevator, and all the way back to the hous..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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d6bcc4d
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I hope you don't mind my asking," Douglas said, "but I noticed the statue outside, and are you guys Christian? I thought you were Indian."
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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8acbf27
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Did you have to try for a while?" He thought it a bold question, coming from a stranger. But he was honest with her, his thoughts still loose from the spiked lemonade. "Would you believe, with Maya it happened the first time," he said. He remembered how proud he'd felt, how powerful. The first time in his life he'd had sex without contraception a life had begun."
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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6a24ada
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But you don't wear an engagement ring." "I don't have one." He studied the bangle, turning it slowly around. "What kind of man proposes without a ring?" She explained, then, that there had not been a proposal, that she hardly knew Navin. She was looking away, at a dried-out plant on the terrace, but she felt his eyes on her, intrigued, unafraid. "Then why are you marrying him?" She told him the truth, a truth she had not told anybody. "I th..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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d7f8899
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It is the goddess Kali," Mrs. Dixit explained brightly,"
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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c3f6bfa
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The sunlight on her hair.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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7b93544
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One could say that the mechanism of metamorphosis is the only element of life that never changes. The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch, of the entire universe and all it contains, is nothing but a series of changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion. ..
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existence
music
life
transformation
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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9d52cb1
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asked Paul to help him put it out on the
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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acead9e
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She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream, or dropping a letter in a mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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7c6ed28
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Belonging to another man and therefore not even a little bit to him.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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989fef7
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There had been nothing worse than waiting for it to come; the void that followed was easier to bear than the solid weight of those days.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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741b38a
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Havia a ansiedade de que uum dia nao se sucedesse ao outro, junto com a certeza de que certamente se sucederia. Era como prender a respiracao, como Udayan tentara fazer na baixada. E, no entanto, de alguma maneira ela estava respirando. Assim como o tempo ficava parado, mas tambem passava, alguma outra parte de seu corpo que lhe era inconsciente estava agora extraindo oxigencio, obrigando-os a continuar.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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361a2ac
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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.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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eb3b6ca
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At the end of that week, Navin arrived to marry me. I was repulsed by the sight of him, not because I had betrayed him but because he still breathed, because he was there for me and had countless more days to live. And yet without his even realizing it, firmly but without force, Navin pulled me away from you, as the final gust of autumn wind pulls the last leaves from the trees. We were married, we were blessed, my hand was placed on top of..
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love
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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8b9c94f
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knowledge,
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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ea9f33e
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In the months before coming to Italy, I was looking for another direction for my writing. I wanted a new approach. I didn't know that the language I had studied slowly for many years in America would, finally, give me the direction.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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6749a9e
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It's a sort of literary act of survival. I don't have many words to express myself-- rather, the opposite. I'm aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need. I find again the pleasure I've felt since I was a child: putting words in a notebook that no one will read. In Italian I write without style, in a primitive way. I'm always uncertain. My..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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5410404
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Referring to my desire to appropriate Italian, he [Domenico Starnone] wrote, 'A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.' How much those words reassured me... They contained all my yearning, all my disorientation. Reading this message, I understood better the impulse to express myself in a new language. To subject myself, as a writer, to a metamorphosis.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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34a7fe3
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I have terrible urges, Mr. Kapasi, to throw things away. One day I had the urge to throw everything I own out the window, the television, the children, everything. Don't you think it's unhealthy?
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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a8b86e0
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He looked at her, in her red plaid skirt and strawberry T-shirt, a woman not yet thirty, who loved neither her husband nor her children, who had already fallen out of love with life.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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cb1dc7b
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The job was a sign of his failings. In his youth he'd been a devoted scholar of foreign languages, the owner of an impressive collection of dictionaries. He had dreamed of being an interpreter for diplomats and dignitaries, resolving conflicts between people and nations, settling disputes of which he alone could understand both sides. He was a self-educated man. In a series of notebooks, in the evenings before his parents settled his marria..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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459daf8
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I am the daughter of a mother who would never change...The refusal to modify her aspect, her habits, her attitudes was strategy for resisting American culture, for fighting it, for maintaining her identity...When my mother returns to Calcutta, she is proud of the fact that, in spite of almost fifty years away from India, she seems like a woman who never left. I am the opposite. While the refusal to change was my mother's rebellion, the ins..
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change-is-the-constant
constants-do-not-need-to-change
inherent-is-good
ovid
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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3075c53
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If the process of writing is a dream, the book cover represents the awakening.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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967b27a
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Personally, I think it deplorable to place the words and opinions of others on the book jacket. I want the first words read by the reader of my book to be written by me.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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a8c689e
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Men require that you caress them with your expression
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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ec480eb
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The better I understand the language, the more confusing it is.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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969cfa7
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In the face of everything that seems to me unattainable, I marvel. Without a sense of marvel at things, without wonder, one can't create anything.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |