It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the word for yesterday, kal, was also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali one needed an adjective, or relied on the tense of a verb, to distinguish what had already happened from what would be.


Jhumpa Lahiri

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MALCOLM NOTHLING
There was a long pause. "Um, I'm afraid I don't know the word in English."
"The word for what?"...
SCOTT WESTERFELD
The rules only applied to
people who couldn’t afford different rules.
CAMERON STRACHER
She was English, with all the characteristics that word implies.
SUSAN KAY
If the word 'No' was removed from the English language, Ian Paisley would be speechless
JOHN HUME
If the word 'No' was removed from the English language, Ian Paisley would be speechless.
JOHN HUME
The profound ability to use aural and written language has enabled our species to collectively explo...
KATHERINE VUCICEVIC
To have the time to reminisce is one of the futures gifts. Don't think to much, don't live to fast, ...
CALVIN WILSON
We are the masters of our own destinies we shape and mould our lives into to the circumstances surro...
GARY F EVANS...
And the day came out... the mask was removed... and who was behind it?
...
No Face... a pe...
DEYTH BANGER
Reality is the only word in the English language that should always be used in quotes.
JOAN LARSEN
"Reality" is the only word in the English language that should always be used in quotes.
UNKNOWN
If Stephen King was a killer, he will be the best killer ever existed, check out his novels, check o...
DEYTH BANGER
He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives...
MARY BALOGH
We were hoping for a miracle, but we knew she wasn't skating so well. The word she used yesterday wa...
BART SCHOUTEN
The boys had asked why, if it acted slowly, was it called quicksand. The Mollusks had replied that, ...
RIDLEY PEARSON
To get over the past, you first have to accept that the past is over. No matter how many times you r...
MANDY HALE
One of the glories of English simplicity is the possibility of using the same word as noun and verb.
EDWARD SAPIR
She never had an unkind word for Jack. And the time she stabbed him, it was an accident. She was in ...
FRANK SINATRA
Literalism gets its name from its insistence that what we find in the Bible is not just the Word of ...
LOUIS CASSELS
The mystery of the written word;It bequeaths a different meaning every blessed day.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
The words we speak will definitely follow us into the future & hunt us either for good or for bad.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
When Ole Kirk Kristiansen established the company name LEGO in 1934, it was a fortunate play on word...
CHRISTIAN HUMBERG
She was intimidating and all I could do was sit back on the couch as she paced back and forth, slowl...
IN THE MAKING
I continue to create because writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light ...
ALICE CHILDRESS
She was convinced a word existed, a noun, that meant the loss of feelings for someone who was former...
OLIVIA SUDJIC
He said a bad word. Do you want to know what it was? It started with F. It's not the one you're thin...
DEREK LANDY
The passenger liner Ossifar Distana was one of the most luxurious of its kind in space anywhere. It ...
CHRISTINA ENGELA
I had a best friend once 20 years down the line a friendship that you just do not get now, i regarde...
GARY F EVANS...
In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
ALAN PERLIS
What happened in the past is just that, the past. Champion or not.
STEVE NASH
Who you know only gets you in the door; what you know gets you the keys to the house.
GINA GREENLEE
The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. B...
GODFRIED DANNEELS
After a trip to Mexico [in 1984]... I fell ill... The illness was protracted... I suffered a mild de...
MORTIMER ADLER
The letter K was the first one in the alphabet which had not, with more or less justification, been ...
HENRIK DAM
We fall back into the past, we jump ahead into the future, and in this we lose our entire lives.
THICH NHAT HANH
The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if...
ROBERTO BOLAñO
She didn't quite know what the relationship was between lunatics and the moon, but it must be a stro...
PAULO COELHO
Frankly I love the word 'nigga.' It is my favorite word in the English language because no other wor...
TODD BOYD
I have always wished the present to resemble memory: because the present can be flat at times, and b...
LYDIA MILLET
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
BIBLE
‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
There are indications that at least one of the people involved in this that was arrested was yesterd...
RUDY GIULIANI
In the beginning there was the word. The word was Jah. The word is in I, Jah is in I. I make what is...
PETER TOSH
Love is a word that is used to loosely now if people knew what love was they would respect the word ...
GARY F EVANS...
But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
All the things that are in the past are in the past.
PABLO SANDOVAL
There's no sustenance in the past.
VIOLETTE LEDUC
Regret; The saddest word in the English language.
TONYA HURLEY
What was “grokking”? He had been using the word for a week—and he didn’t grok it.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The word tomorrow was invented for indecisive people and for children.
IVAN TURGENEV
That's the good thing about it. Nothing counts except what's goin' on around you.
H.L. DAVIS
What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is...
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
When you live in the present, the past is forgotten & the future takes care of itself.
MANDY HALE
The very word, “sin,” which seems to have disappeared, was once a proud word. It was once a stro...
KARL MENNINGER
When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was 'It will be O.K....
BOBBY KNIGHT
To search the sands of a lost desert for truth and justice in this world today you might as well be ...
GARY F EVANS...
Kell would say it was impossible. What a useless word, in a world with magic.
V.E. SCHWAB
Ava, People are the impossible, but most of us don’t see it, and that’s what limits us: the freq...
J.A. GEORGE
The worst... was what the Pakistani soldiers did to the Bengali women after their failed rebellion.
IRIS CHANG
Time that is spent dwelling on the past will surely continue in your present moment - and the future...
MICHELLE CRUZ-ROSADO
All last year we tried to teach him English, and the only word he learned was million.
, ON PITCHER FERNANDO VALENZUELA
That's history. I say history because it happened in the past.
MURRAY WALKER
The bulkheads were close together, the ceilings low above their helmets. Not much space in there to ...
CHRISTINA ENGELA
It shouldn't have mattered, not when Miel and the other girls in his class wore jeans more than they...
ANNA-MARIE MCLEMORE
In the beginning, there was nothing and from nothing came our species then behold the dawn of music....
GARY F EVANS...
If anybody dared say wrestling was fake, you'd punch 'em. And you never used the word show. ...
HULK HOGAN
Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over.
RICHARD CARLSON
For the Word, realizing that in no other way would the corruption of human beings be undone except, ...
ATHANASIUS OF ALEXANDRIA
When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, t...
WILLIAM STYRON
Time is a teacher which in the end it kills all it's students. (Synchronicity 2015 Film)
DEYTH BANGER
Anyways, that very same night there was a fight in the casino on B Deck. Some of the passengers got ...
CHRISTINA ENGELA
The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change ev...
JON KRAKAUER
I once used the word OBSOLETE in a headline, only to discover that 43 per cent of housewives had no ...
DAVID OGILVY
Calling a young artist 'great' these days can give one the heebie-jeebies: The word has been...
JERRY SALTZ
Paul's one thing was committing to forget about the past, to forge ahead into the future.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
What the Rams did to him was wrong. It isn't that they traded him. But they put the word out that he...
GLADYS BETTIS
When I moved to Bombay, it was very harsh. I was nothing like what I am today. I couldn't speak ...
KANGANA RANAUT
The door opened. She looked in the mirror and suppressed a curse. Slipping in behind some tourists, ...
LAINI TAYLOR
We in the cast knew we had something special in this series. The big question was whether or not it ...
MARTIN SHEEN
Better still [than pure sugar] was the remedy known as theriac, the root of the English word 'treacl...
PHILIP BALL
She's been spreading the word among her friends. She was also a guest for us at an intimate screenin...
CONNIE WHITE
The things i know now, i never knew then. I wish i knew.
SOTONYE ANGA
The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.
JIM HARRISON
In the beginning there was the Word. Then we broke it.
LJUPKA CVETANOVA
7. This is a consensus view among scholars today. For one thing, Matthew used Mark as a source for m...
BART D. EHRMAN
All last year we tried to teach him Fernando Valenzuela English, and the only word he learned was mi...
TOMMY LASORDA
Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a ca...
STEPHEN KING
What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing...
ALICE MUNRO
What is the shortest word in the English language that contains the letters: abcdef? Answer: feedbac...
SOURCE UNKNOWN
I was terrible in English. I couldn't stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about w...
RICHARD FEYNMAN
I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started...
ANNE CARSON
So a voice in the mountain is enough to let loose an avalanche. A word too much may be followed by a...
VICTOR HUGO
The body of the Word, then, being a real human body, in spite of its having been uniquely formed fro...
ATHANASIUS OF ALEXANDRIA
In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word i...
ORSON WELLES
'Shabiha' is a difficult word to translate into English. It comes from the word Syrians used...
RICHARD ENGEL
'No' is the second shortest word in the English language, but one of the hardest to say.
RAYMOND ARROYO
Just because you believe something was true in the past does not mean it will be true in the future.
JEFFREY FRY
I have had shoulder injuries in the past, but usually it's from training.
WARREN CUCCURULLO
The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it...
JOSEPH CONRAD

More Jhumpa Lahiri

The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.
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That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.
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I feel partly American, but I have an ambiguous relation with both America and India, the only two c...
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A lot of my personality was informed by feeling very different in the world I grew up in, feeling th...
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The essential dilemma of my life is between my deep desire to belong and my suspicion of belonging.
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I think, like any artist or any writer, I just want to have that pure freedom of expression and of t...
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All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.
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When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous ...
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Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it's an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I...
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My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father ca...
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Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of wha...
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I have two young children, and I will say that motherhood is its own peak, just like in the process ...
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Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant,...
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In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced Engl...
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I think it's the small things, the smaller episodes and details that I linger on and try to draw...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
You can't have a hit every time. The main thing is to keep on working and not be afraid to take ...
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He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, wh...
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I think that what I have been truly searching for as a person, as a writer, as a thinker, as a daugh...
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This story is based on a gentleman who indeed did... used to come to my parents' house in 1971 f...
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I find it really liberating to be in a place where I am a foreigner in every way. I've lived wit...
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On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of unfami...
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The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
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Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and...
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I've gained a lot from James Joyce, Tolstoy, Chekhov and R. K. Narayan. While writing, I try to ...
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It took me a long time to even dare to envision myself as a writer. I was very uncertain and hesitan...
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From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders...
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Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a p...
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I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an acce...
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It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My n...
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The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters—it was something about the way they carried ...
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Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.
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Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will t...
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Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold. Blindly...
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I think if you speak to any creative person, there's something so powerful - so intoxicating, if...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
On the technical side, I hope that my writing is evolving and maturing, ripening, deepening.
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I'm always intrigued by authors who say, 'This book took 17 drafts.' They're very cl...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
I have two passports because I have to have at least one, and I really don't know how I define m...
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I think there are a lot of misconceptions on both sides, the developing vs. the developed world, esp...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
I had been learning Italian for years. I always loved Latin, but Italian is a living language; I'...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one anoth...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocea...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
It was important to me to become day-to-day fluent and functional in another language, and about 10 ...
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A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They w...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabl...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was so...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
He saw that his mother was dwelling in an alternate time, a more bearable reality.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people’s lives, though all of it, s...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So ...
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When Deepa poured Bela some water from the urn that stood on a little stool, in the corner of the ro...
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She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Time flowed for Bela in the opposite direction. The day after yesterday, she sometimes said. Pronoun...
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Plato says the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tr...
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But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out ...
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The imperfection became a mark of distinction about their home. Something visitors noticed, the firs...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Writing down call numbers with short pencils, searching up and down aisles that would turn dark when...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
I don't know, he said, handing her the ticket. He'd been standing there all the while on the sidewal...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Too much information, and yet, in her case, not enough. In a world of diminishing mystery, the unkno...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Everything in Bela's life has been a reaction. I am who I am, she would say, I live as I do because ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Nor was her love for Udayan recognizable or intact. Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging throu...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it wo...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
...learning was an act of rediscovery, knowledge a form of remembering.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart an...
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War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war,
JHUMPA LAHIRI
With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before
JHUMPA LAHIRI
With her own hand she'd painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
And yet he had loved her. A Bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She'd be...
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Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tr...
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For that story, I took as my subject a young woman whom I got to know over the course of a couple of...
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In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
I've always been searching to arrive at a certain voice that will probably elude me forever.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
I think about the structure, sure. I think about what's going to happen, and how it's going ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of...
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On weekdays, as soon as she picked Bela from the bus stop and brought her home, she went straight in...
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While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new worl...
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Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each pe...
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I'm from Kingston, R.I., sort of on the University of Rhode Island campus - on the margins of th...
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Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so f...
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I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount t...
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If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fict...
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If you look at my characters as a group, they all have a different relationship with the way that pl...
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Even printed, on pages that are bound, sentences remain unsettled organisms. Years later, I can alwa...
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I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time whil...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the b...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to la...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking too much abo...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a ...
JHUMPA LAHIRI
It imparts a certain momentum to nuclear negotiations with the US. France has played a significant r...
DILIP LAHIRI
There is a great deal of French interest in India now that must still be converted into action on th...
DILIP LAHIRI