The Lowland Quotes

“Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Isolation offered its own form of companionship”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“And yet he had loved her. A Bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She'd been prepared to live her life alone but from the moment he'd known her he'd needed her.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold. Blindly planning for it, envisioning things that weren't the case. This was the working of the will. This was what gave the world purpose and direction. Not what was there but what was not.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“With her own hand she'd painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war,”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it would.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“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, The Lowland

“...learning was an act of rediscovery, knowledge a form of remembering.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Nor was her love for Udayan recognizable or intact. Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging through her like some helplessly mating pair of insects. Anger at him for dying when he might have lived. For bringing her happiness, and then taking it away. For trusting her, only to betray her. For believing in sacrifice, only to be so selfish in the end.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Everything in Bela's life has been a reaction. I am who I am, she would say, I live as I do because of you.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Too much information, and yet, in her case, not enough. In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Writing down call numbers with short pencils, searching up and down aisles that would turn dark when the timers on the lights expired. She recalls, visually, certain passages in the books she'd read. Which side of the book, where on the page.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“The imperfection became a mark of distinction about their home. Something visitors noticed, the first family anecdote that was told.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night. She had no wish to overcome it. Rather, it was something upon which she’d come to depend, with which she’d entered by now into a relationship, more satisfying and enduring than the relationships she’d experienced in either of her marriages.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Plato says the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“I don't know, he said, handing her the ticket. He'd been standing there all the while on the sidewalk, waiting for her. Waiting, until they were in the darkness of the theatre, to take her hand.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Amid the gray, an incongruous band of daytime blue asserts itself. To the west, a pink sun already begins its descent. The effect is of three isolated aspects, distinct phases of the day. All of it, strewn across the horizon, is contained in his vision.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of his dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day. The difference was so extreme that he could not accommodate the two places together in his mind. In this enormous new country, there seemed to be nowhere for the old to reside. There was nothing to link them; he was the sole link. Here life ceased to obstruct or assault him. Here was a place where humanity was not always pushing, rushing, running as if with a fire at its back”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Time flowed for Bela in the opposite direction. The day after yesterday, she sometimes said. Pronounced slightly differently, Bela’s name, the name of a flower, was itself the word for a span of time, a portion of the day. Shakal bela meant morning; bikel bela, afternoon. Ratrir bela was night. Bela’s yesterday was a receptacle for anything her mind stored. Any experience or impression that had come before. Her memory was brief, its contents limited. Lacking chronology, randomly rearranged.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered,”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people’s lives, though all of it, she thinks, was previously wanted, once useful. She feels the sun scorching the back of her neck. The heat is at its worst now, the rains still a few months away. The task satisfies her. It passes the time.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance. On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguished day from night, that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening and diminishing, something neither alive nor dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away. In one of her notebooks from Calcutta were jottings in Udayan’s hand, on the laws of classical physics. Newton’s theory that time was an absolute entity, a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. Einstein’s contribution, that time and space were intertwined. He’d described it in terms of particles, velocities. A system of relations among instantaneous events. Something called time”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“He regretted only one thing: that he had not met her sooner, that he had not known her every day of his life.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland