Interpreter of Maladies Quotes

“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.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“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?”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“It is the goddess Kali,” Mrs. Dixit explained brightly,”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“For what is a writer, if not an interpreter of maladies?”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“but these talents could not make up for the fact that she did not possess a fair complexion, and so a string of men had rejected her to her face.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear." -When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”
― Jhumpa Lahiri , Interpreter of Maladies

“Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“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 marriage, he had listed the common etymologies of words, and at one point in his life he was confident that he could converse, if given the opportunity, in English, French, Russian, Portuguese, and Italian, not to mention Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, and Gujarati. Now only a handful of European phrases remained in his memory, scattered words for things like saucers and chairs. English was the only non-Indian language he spoke fluently anymore. Mr. Kapasi knew it was not a remarkable talent. Sometimes he feared that his children knew better English than he did, just from watching television. Still, it came in handy for the tours.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“knowledge,”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“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 he earned at the grammar school, he accepted.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“They were all like siblings, Mr. Kapasi thought as they passed a row of date trees. Mr. and Mrs. Das behaved like an older brother and sister, not parents.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Though Mr. Kapasi had been to the temple countless times, it occurred to him, as he, too, gazed at the topless women, that he had never seen his own wife fully naked. Even when they had made love she kept the panels of her blouse hooked together, the string of her petticoat knotted around her waist.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“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 promise that he would hear from Mrs. Das now filled him with the same belief.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“They had concurred too on their adolescent but still persistent fondness for Wodehouse novels, and their dislike for the sitar, and later Twinkle confessed that she was charmed by the way Sanjeev had dutifully refilled her teacup during their conversation.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“What does sexy mean? He leans back with his arm thrown over his eyes. It means you love someone you don't know.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Her soliloquies mawkish, her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“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.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Mr. Kapasi had never thought of his job in such complimentary terms. To him it was a thankless occupation. He found nothing noble in interpreting people’s maladies,”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“He had wanted to say to her then, You could unpack some boxes. You could sweep the attic. You could retouch the paint on the bathroom windowsill, and after you do it you could warn me so that I don't put my watch on it.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“He stepped into the foyer, impeccably suited and scarved, with a silk tie knotted at his collar. Each evening he appeared in ensembles of plums, olives, and chocolate browns. He was a compact man, and though his feet were perpetually splayed, and his belly slightly wide, he nevertheless maintained an efficient posture, as if balancing in either hand two suitcases of equal weight. His ears were insulated by tufts of graying hair that seemed to block out the unpleasant traffic of life. He had thickly lashed eyes shaded with a trace of camphor, a generous mustache that turned up playfully at the ends, and a mole shaped like a flattened raisin in the very center of his left cheek. On his head he wore a black fez made from the wool of Persian lambs, secured by bobby pins, without which I was never to see him. Though my father always offered to fetch him in our car, Mr. Pirzada preferred to walk from his dormitory to our neighborhood, a distance of about twenty minutes on foot, studying trees and shrubs on his way, and when he entered our house his knuckles were pink with the effects of crisp autumn air.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“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

“When he pictured her so many thousands of miles away he plummeted, so much so that he had an overwhelming urge to wrap his arms around her, to freeze with her, even for an instant, in an embrace witnessed by his favorite Surya.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Our meals, our actions, were only a shadow of what had already happened there, a lagging ghost of where Mr. Pirzada really belonged. At”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“The fact that the yellow chintz armchair in the living room clashed with the blue-and-maroon Turkish carpet no longer bothered her.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“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. He”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Each day, Shukumar noticed, her beauty, which had once overwhelmed him, seemed to fade. The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“As Mr. Sen backed out of the parking lot, he put his arm across the top of the front seat, so that it looked as if he had his arm around Mrs. Sen.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies