A Quote by Jhumpa Lahiri

It is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Quote Topics

Affect Alter Arranged Conjure Dimensions Handful Magical People Person Place Profoundly Real Real People Situation Specificity Stop Stop Time Thing Things Time Us Words

Quote Author

Jhumpa Lahiri
American - Author
Born: July 11, 1967

Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

Jhumpa Lahiri

The old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect - but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence. Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.

Aldous Huxley

As we have seen from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's example, even one justice can profoundly alter the meaning of those words for our citizens. Even one justice can deeply affect the rights and liberties of the American people.

Edward Kennedy

You're different. You're more perfect. Time is three things for most people, but for you, for us, just one. A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you're the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn. Time moves about you but never moves you. It has lost its ability to affect you. What is it they say? That time is theft? But not for you. Close your eyes and you can start all over again. Conjure up that necessary emotion, fresh as roses.

Jonathan Nolan

Honestly, I believe that the mother-daughter relationship is magical, complex, potentially dangerous, profoundly powerful, and deeply transformative. To put it simply, all of us have this relationship, and in a very real way, "none of us comes out alive." We are all formed first as daughters and then tested as mothers. There's nothing like motherhood to make us reassess how we were as daughters.

Kristin Hannah

The truth is, bad things don't affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That's true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.

Daniel Gilbert

It's not completely obvious what gravity is, fundamentally, or what dimensions are, fundamentally. One of these days we'll understand better what we mean, what is the fundamental thing that's given us space in the first place and dimensions of space in particular.

Lisa Randall

When we choose to be parents, we accept another human being as part of ourselves, and a large part of our emotional selves will stay with that person as long as we live. From that time on, there will be another person on this earth whose orbit around us will affect us as surely as the moon affects the tides, and affect us in some ways more deeply than anyone else can. Our children are extensions of ourselves.

Fred Rogers

How we live our lives does not,unfortunately depend on us alone.Circumstances,good or bad,constantly intervene.A person close to us die.A person not so close to us carries on living.All these things affect how we live.

Tariq Ali

Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us.

David Riesman

The daily press, the immediate media, is superb at synecdoche, at giving us a small thing that stands for a much larger thing. Reporters on the ground, embedded or otherwise, can tell us about or send us pictures of what happened in that place at that time among those people.

Bruce Jackson

The idea of a hell that involves some kind of eternal punishment at the hands of a just and holy God is so profoundly difficult for us to handle emotionally, that the only person who would have enough authority to convince us of the reality of such a place would be Jesus Himself.

John Gerstner

Emotionally, a person can become so negatively driven that they don't respect the privilege of being on this Earth without their mother and their father. They may say it doesn't bother them, but there is something in us about those who are a biological part of us and don't care. People in that situation stop hearing the other voices that love them, hold them, trust them and tells them how great they are. They're focused on that one person who isn't answering them.

Bill Cosby

But that Franklin trip changed me profoundly. As I believe wilderness experience changes everyone. Because it puts us in our place. The human place, which our species inhabited for most of its evolutionary life. That place that shaped our psyches and made us who we are. The place where nature is big and we are small.