Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door.

When you come from an immigrant home, you're in a whole different world until you leave your house. In my teenage years, I had to learn to switch cultures the second I left my house and, when I came back, to go back to my fundamentals.

I'm so used to America, used to the traffic in L.A., and I don't really feel it click with the Korean culture. But obviously, I have a Korean face, and I feel like that's just - you know, I can't walk around people like I'm, like, straight-up American. It's like, I'm Korean American. My parents are from Korea.

My closest friends from Israel make fun of me for becoming an American, and my American friends make fun of how Israeli I am... I can't win.

I grew up in the States, but I go back to Brazil quite often, and a big part of me is very Brazilian, so there's a constant struggle between the two cultures within me. They're very different approaches to life.

My parents were attached to Russian culture by a thousand ineradicable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, nor could they have. I assimilated wholeheartedly, found my parents in many ways embarrassing, and allowed my Russian to decline through neglect.

I lived for 30 years in the U.S., but always kept my Islamic and Iranian culture and customs... even now, western lifestyle feels strange to me.

The Jews had a love-hate relationship with the Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolaters.

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

I realized how Latina I was, and then also, at the same time, how not Latina enough I was, because I'm born and raised in Los Angeles. I speak Spanish, but I don't speak perfect Spanish, not like a native speaker.

Even though I'm very Westernized as an individual and very Canadian, I guess I've lost some of my Chinese culture.

If you take my own life, the longer you stay in a country, you almost lose your former self and become this third-party person who is caught in between two worlds.

I would go to school and be American and then come home and be Greek.

You're trying to grow up, and you don't want to be like your parents, and that gets mixed up with being Korean... They brought their values from Korea, and I accepted them because I didn't know anything more. But as I grow older, I feel more Korean every year; it's very strange.

I think that a lot of the stories I would see was kids who are first-generation immigrants, watching them try to rip themselves from their family and their faith and kind of erase. I hadn't really seen anything where someone's trying to reconcile the two.

I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.

Like so many other young South Asians in America, I am the product of two cultures whose conflicting values pull at me with equal urgency. Never have I felt as torn between the two as I do about the question of marriage.

Growing up, I've always felt I was from two different worlds. I was born in the U.S., but my parents were born in Vietnam, and they raised my sisters and I with the parenting methods of the Vietnamese culture.

We are under attack. Our culture, society, traditions, and way of life are at risk.

The writer, Ruth Jhabvala, livedin India but was German. My partner Ismail Merchant was from Bombay but was educated in England and he had a different view on the world. Probably they had to contend with some sort of Oregonian-ness in me that they didn't understand and didn't know where it was coming from.

Westernized Indians don't like my books and I tend not to like westernized Indians - so we're quits.

I feel a little schizophrenic because my life is so totally different from here, obviously. And the French values are so different from American values.

What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact.

In many immigrant families, the parents are just talking and talking about the home country until the children are like, 'Oh, don't tell us any more.'

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'