Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

My whole life, I've seen things I can't unsee.

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.

Injuries may be forgiven, but not forgotten.

It is the little things that pierce and burn and prick for years to come.

I have spent much of my adult life flinching with pain as I tried to pull out the threads that bound the shadows of my past to me.

There are certain images that always haunt me.

Everybody's got some things that have happened bad in their past. Mine was just very public.

The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.

The past was so past it hurt.

People always remember the worst day of their lifes. It becomes a part of them forever.

What deep wounds ever closed without a scar? The hearts bleed longest, and heals but to wear That which disfigures it.

There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.

in her dreams, blood tasted like fizzy strawberry soda. If you drank it too fast, you got brain freeze. When she was older, after she'd licked a cut on her finger, the taste of that became the taste in her dreams: copper and tears.

When the wound/ No longer hurts/ The scar does.

I'd still thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the fear-would fade in time. But that hadn't happened. Instead, the things that I remembered, these little details, seemed to grow stronger, to the point where I could feel their weight in my chest. Nothing, however stuck with me more than the memory of stepping into that dark room and what I found there, and how the light then took that nightmare and made it real.

All those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.

Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

I've been left for someone...all those things...It was sometimes a surprise, and sometimes you saw t coming. The most painful was when I kept trying to get someone back. But we all make dumb mistakes.

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

Every fear, every night terror, every hour I cried for Liev, every fight with Sebastian is registered as a neat white scar.

My childhood was absolutely the worst place I've ever been," "It was terrible.

What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?

That's the funny thing about old hurts- they just wait for new heartache to come along and then show up, just as sharp and horrible as the first day you woke up with the world changed all around you.

There are years from my childhood that I cannot remember and I cannot forget.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.