Roman Stories Quotes

“How long must we live to learn how to survive?
How many times incipit vita nova?”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

“Distances help, as does changing one's perspective on a regular basis—they make the end of a long marriage easier to bear, they lighten the load of an unhappy childhood and an adolescence spent under a rock and the fear of having ruined nearly everything.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

“Our deepest memories are like infinite roots reflected in the brook, a simulacrum without end. And yet every story, like every life, lasts only so long.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

“It's strange to feel married, in the end, more to a place than to a person. I hope to die here and nowhere else.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

“And he'll think, with a certain melancholy, when he watches the water clamber up the shore, that every effort, and even every pleasure in life, every goal that's reached and achieved, every recollection, lasts only for an instant, just like the water that throws itself onto the beach, leaving a spontaneous imprint whose wavering contours, like the line drawn by a heart monitor, are never quite the same.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

“She'd like to be that flowering stem, she told me, swaying in peace: vibrant, free, cradled and sustained by nothing but air.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

“It’s strange that maternal anxiety grows with time, that you get worse with the years. I’d have thought the opposite, but how can we bear the distances, the absences, the silences our own children generate?”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

“It's strange that maternal anxiety grows with time, that you get worse with the years. I'd have thought the opposite, but how can we bear the distances, the absences, the silences our own children generate?”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

“Only words cede, those spoken and delivered by hand, and friendships, and cells, and shoes with leopard spots and Sunday lunches of long ago, and passions in adolescence and in adulthood, and stores that sell knives and small appliances, parental worries, children's voices, clamshells on the edge of your plate. A few regrets endure. I still wait to be forgiven by my husband, and to say, when I'm seventeen, to a tortured and fearless boy, that I love him too.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

“You travel a certain distance, you desire and make decisions, and you're left with recollections, some shimmering and some disturbing, that you'd rather not conjure on. But today, in the basilica, memory dominates, the deepest kind. It waits for you under the rock—bits of yourself, still living and restless, that shudder when you expose them.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

“You travel a certain distance, you desire and make decisions, and you’re left with recollections, some shimmering and some disturbing, that you’d rather not conjure up.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

“HOW LONG must we live to learn how to survive?

How many times incipit vita nova?

I make plans to have dinner with my friends. A clear blue sky extends over the piazza.

"This city is shit," one of us says, breaking the silence. "But so damn beautiful.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

“Certain stories are hard to bear, as are certain things we've lived or observed or fumbled or explored with great care. They transmit an energy that extends beyond the disposable day-to-day. Our deepest memories are like infinite roots reflected in the brook, a simulacrum without end. And yet every story, like every life, lasts only so long.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

“Sometimes I catch sight of a particular kind of face: full pale lips, shiny skin, the expression lit up by the heavy shaft of light from a lamppost.
For a few hours after midnight, this ancient city seems to belong only to the young: a joyful kingdom, ephemeral, all their own.
Among them, I notice a few kids with different features, with darker complexions like mine. A strange harmony binds them together: nocturnal complicity, identical gestures.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories