A Quote by Jhumpa Lahiri

I have two young children, and I will say that motherhood is its own peak, just like in the process of writing: one climbs and is continuously moving with each book. Becoming a mother is the greatest connection I've ever felt to being spiritual.
My books are based on the "what if" principle. "What if you became invisible?" or "What if you did change into your mother for one day?" I then take it from there. Each book takes several months in the long process of writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting, and each has its own set of problems. The one thing I dislike about the writing process is the sometimes-loneliness of it all. Readers only get to see the glamour part of a bound book, not some of the agonizing moments one has while constructing it.
It's hard to say how we compare to other people. We each inhabit our own personalities. I have often felt that I'm a very neutral being and that I have almost no personality. I'm drawn to writing partly because I'm fascinated by the mimetic process.
I think the gift of my mother's death, if anything so terrible can be said to have an upside to it, is that I was always keenly aware that life was fleeting, and that you'd better live while you have the chance. As I say in the book, since I was 19 years old I felt like I was living for two, and when I out-lived my mother, when I got into my forties, it felt like a miracle to me.
It's with a heavy heart that I have decided that I can't relocate. I have two babies under 4. Being a mother and wife comes first, and I just cannot uproot my children and separate the family by moving away. I will miss this job desperately and wish everyone the absolute best.
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
I'm a fifth generation Jew from the South, and I would say that I felt this connection to my religion, but it wasn't a spiritual connection.
From a very young age, I felt a spiritual, visceral, instinctual connection with 'black is beautiful.' Just the black experience and wanting to celebrate that. And I didn't know how to articulate that as a young child.
To me, one of the greatest triumphs in doing a book is to tell the story as simply as possible. My aim is to imply rather than to overstate. Whenever the reader participates with his own interpretation, I feel that the book is much more successful. I write with the premise that less is more. Writing is not difficult to me. I read into a tape recorder, constantly dropping a word here and there from my manuscript until I get a minimum amount of words to say exactly what I want to say. Each time I drop a word or two, it brings me a sense of victory!
The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.
The best writing advice I ever got was "Keep moving forward, don't retreat into rewrites." The worst came from a book that said "Writing fiction is like telling lies," which just seems stupid to me.
Becoming a mother has been the best thing ever for me. It's become my life's work. Not just parenting, but sharing information and encouraging other women to be receptive to the basic nature of motherhood.
The amazing thing about becoming a parent is that you will never again be your own first priority. The gift of motherhood is the selflessness that it introduces you to, and I think that's really freeing... I think it allows you to put yourself in other people's shoes...the empathy that it slugs you with, being a mother. And I think it makes you a better storyteller.
All I can say, being young people being in a band, writing songs that we felt were great... we never felt that years later we'd be selling out shows.
There is no theoretical study of motherhood. You know, before I became a mother, I did play a mother, but I was like - I was more thinking of my own mother. I was doing my mother.
My mother is old-fashioned; she raised us like girls from a 19th-century book. My sisters and I are known for being the most polite girls in France. My mother wanted us to be like royalty: never ever will you be caught being rude, or superficial or being a star or whatever.
Becoming a grandmother has felt like being a mother.
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