Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

I'd say my mother made more of a difference to me than anyone else did. I know that's a conventional and perhaps mundane answer, but my family was blown apart at the start of World War II.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

My mom and my dad are still together, but so many of my friends who got married just a few years ago aren't. Maybe it's that we compare ourselves to our parents' generation, thinking, 'Who's still together, and are they happy?'

Your parents are the parents you know best. Your brother and sister, if you have them, are the brother and sister you know best. They may not be the ones you like the best. They may not be the most interesting, but they are the closest and probably the clearest to you.

I don't want my son to have to collect a bunch of 'New York Times' articles to see what I was like.

I know I've got a lot of my mother in me.

I think a lot of us are a lot more cautious with marriage because of what we saw happening with our parents. I see a lot more healthy marriages in my generation than they probably saw in theirs.

I think I realized my parents' relationship was special when I had my first girlfriend, and she came from a broken marriage. I watched how much closeness there was between her and her mom, and also how much bickering.

I'm not as tough as my Dad.

As far as children out there that hate their moms and dads, just get over it, because you get one dad and one mom. You know, suck it up. Learn something.

I'm not really emotionally dependant on anybody except my son, my daughter-in-law, and my grandchildren. But a partner... I haven't felt like that for so many years, I don't really remember what it was like.

Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were the child of a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better than average marriage yourself – either through some genetic inheritance or because you’d learnt from example? But it doesn’t seem to work like that. So perhaps you need the opposite example – to see mistakes in order not to make them yourself. Except this would mean that the best way for parents to ensure their children have happy marriages would be to have unhappy ones themselves. So what’s the answer?

In the cab to the station, he told me that when he was growing up he'd see a look of pleasure cross his mother's face and ask what she was thinking: she'd say, I was just thinking of your father. "That's how I want us to be," Archie said. I smiled. "What?" I said, "I was just thinking of your father.

I was a lawyer and I have been married to a lawyer. I think one lawyer per household is plenty. It's a good quota for us.

Then, there's the modern mother-in-law. In her mid 40s, she is the compact car of her breed: efficient, trim, attractive and in harmony with her times. She's pretty stiff competition for the plain young matron who's overweight and under-financed. If there is going to be friction in this relationship, it could start from envy and resentment in the younger woman. But Father Time is on her side, even if Mother Nature played her a dirty trick

First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.

Though she doesn't remember any trauma, she said that her parents told her she cried on a daily basis and her grandmother resorted to passing out candy so the kids would play with her. Though it was a humorous moment, Mila said, "I know, God bless her. She's an amazing, amazing woman."

I'm very connected to my own family, and maybe I like to explore the feelings that come up in families. I'm fortunate that my parents taught me to look further into why I might feel a certain way; it was normal to expose things.

With our parents we bury our past, with our children our future.

Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.

For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.

That family glaze of common references, jokes, events, calamities-that sense of a family being like a kitchen midden: layer upon layer of the things daily life is made of. The edifice that lovers build is by comparison delicate and one-dimensional.

Being an adult child was an awkward, inevitable position. You went about your business in the world: tooling around, giving orders, being taken seriously, but there were still these two people lurking somewhere who in a split second could reduce you to nothing. In their presence, you were a big-headed baby again, crawling instead of walking.

How many of the people I know - sons and daughters - have intricate abstract expressionist paintings of their mothers, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands. And how many have only Polaroid pictures of their fathers.