"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 (Interpreter of Maladies)

"They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end."
— Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake)

"That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet."
— Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake)

"Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go."
— Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake)

"In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another...They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end."
— Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake)

"For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect."
— Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake)

"One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist."
— Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake)

"He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past."
— Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake)

""You don't have to agree with me, but I think the heart of who we are stays pretty much the same," Hope said, "What changes is how those core traits manifest themselves over time.""
— Megan McCafferty (Fourth Comings)

"You can only be in a bad mood for so long before you have to face up to the fact that it isn't a bad mood at all; it's just your sucky personality."
— Megan McCafferty (Sloppy Firsts)

"All subjects are the same. I memorize notes for a test, spew it, ace it, then forget it. What makes this scary for the future of our country is that I'm in the tip-top percentile on every standardized test. I'm a model student with a very crappy attitude about learning.""
— Megan McCafferty (Sloppy Firsts)

"My thoughts create my world -Marcus Flutie"
— Megan McCafferty (Sloppy Firsts)

"You, yes, you, linger inside my heart
The same you who stopped us before we could start."
— Megan McCafferty (Second Helpings)

"I thought Marcus was going to be in my life forever. Then I thought I was wrong. Now he’s back. But this time I know what’s certain: Marcus will be gone again, and back again and again and again because nothing is permanent. Especially people. Strangers become friends. Friends become lovers. Lovers become strangers. Strangers become friends once more, and over and over. Tomorrow, next week, fifty years from now, I know I’ll get another one-word postcard from Marcus, because this one doesn’t have a period signifying the end of the sentence.

Or the end of anything at all."
— Megan McCafferty (Charmed Thirds)