Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

I live on an island, and it's difficult to find.

In West Yorkshire, I'd have to drive three quarters of an hour to go shopping.

I come from a very small city in a rather remote part of America, where writers simply weren't part of the daily fabric.

When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.

I'm from so far back in the sticks that they had to pump the light in there.

I'm from a very small village in the middle of nowhere, four hours by airplane from Moscow. Yemanzhelinsk - you wouldn't find it on the map. Don't even try it. It's super, super tiny.

When I was a kid growing up, I lived in a little rural village called Woolton Hill, and the nearest town was Newbury. No bands played anywhere near us, so as much as I wanted to be on the grid and in the loop, I never was.

I was in a town of about 10,000 people, and a shipping container with a rusty microscope was their medical clinic.

I didn't really know many girls, growing up, because there weren't many other people living around where I lived.

I grew up on a bayou. The small town that I lived in was, like, 10 miles from me. I grew up in the middle of nowhere.

When we were on the farm, we were isolated, not just by geography but by the primitive living conditions: no electricity, no running water and, of course, no computer, no phone.

I was from a tiny little island, which I always say is one corn field away from a horror film: it was, like, isolated, and everybody knew everybody, and you go to school with the grandkids of the grandparents that your grandparents went to school with.

There was a rule, back when I was an education lawyer in Alabama, about visiting public schools: always go on a rainy day so you can see how badly the roofs leak.

A person can't just drive around the North Slope, visit the locals, stop in at a burger joint. There are no locals, no burger joints, no houses, no cities, no churches.

I grew up 150-200 miles from any city. You simply didn't have much connection with the outside world. So my dreams were always to get out. It's a familiar kind of thing, I think, for anybody in a small town.

I wanted to get out of our thimble of a town, where every stone had eyes.

The Bumpuses were so low down on the evolutionary totem pole that they weren't even included in Darwin's famous family tree. They had inbred and ingrown and finally emerged from the Kentucky hills like some remnant of Attila the Hung's barbarian horde. Flick said that they had webbed feet and only three toes. It might have been true.

Everybody seems to wonder what it's like down here. I gotta get away from this day-to-day running around. Everybody knows this is nowhere.

Do they choose to be so dense? Were they born that way? I have no friends. I have nothing. I say nothing. I am nothing.

To call me in, I'm thinking I don't own a suit, a ring, a watch, a cellphone. I'm dragging up out of the woods here. You boys must be hard up these days.

... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

Living in a rural town really compelled me to start tweeting so much. Mostly, my Twitter usage is fueled by loneliness. I can go days without talking to another human being unless it's my mother, especially when I'm not teaching or on break.

The town where I grew up has a zip code of E-I-E-I-O.

Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.

Somewhere out there was a village I'd deprived of it's idiot.