Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

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.

My grandparents bowed to the Americans and sought to learn from them. My parents sought to be them.

People don't know what it's like being the foreigner until they are one.

As a 'parisien d'adoption,' I am only semicognizant of where I may fit at any given time into the French social fabric.

To be a foreigner may be an advantage but disadvantage as well. It was advantage for me for sure.

The strange thing about my life is that I came to America at about the time when racial attitudes were changing. This was a big help to me. Also, the people who were most cruel to me when I first came to America were black Americans. They made absolute fun of the way I talked, the way I dressed. I couldn't dance. The people who were most kind and loving to me were white people. So what can one make of that? Perhaps it was a coincidence that all the people who found me strange were black and all the people who didn't were white.

Even I, when I was a student in London, often wore Western clothes, and yet I'm the most Indian Indian I know.

I've raised daughters who are English, and I'm American, so they're culturally different to me, which is an unusual situation.

Even though I spent the first five years of my life in Nagasaki, going to Japan can be really difficult. Even if they know I've been brought up in the West, they still expect me to understand all the subtleties of their culture, and if I get it wrong, it matters much more than if a British person gets it wrong. I find it intimidating.

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.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

I never did very well as an immigrant. I've lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life.

Only when I came to America did I think of myself as British.

I'm sure I went through a stage when I resented being Indian because in every other manner, in terms of cultural reference points and vocabulary and all the rest of it, I was way ahead of everybody else - so the one thing that set me back was being Indian. And I couldn't do anything about it.

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

I know a lot of Americans in Paris who have married Frenchmen. They keep bringing up their experience, the clash of civilizations, the clash of personalities.

I couldn't be more American if I tried. I was born in Ethiopia, but I was raised and educated as an American.

I feel like my life experience is that of an outsider. Let me explain: my parents are from Panama, and they moved to the United States the year after I was born. They moved into an all-white neighborhood, where the previous black family had a cross burned on their lawn.

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 certainly know German colleagues in the U.S. who try to be Americans, try to melt into Americanism, even before they get married and become American citizens. But I've never tried that.

My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn't matter as much as how I would be perceived.

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.

Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions - most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.

I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.