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Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

— Jhumpa Lahiri Every Day a Word Surprises Me & Other Quotes by Writers by Phaidon (2018)

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More quotes by Jhumpa Lahiri

That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.

yet I know that expressing oneself necessarily means being different. The writer's voice is a singular one, solitary. Art is nothing other than the freedom to express oneself in any language, in whatever manner, dressed any which way.

The Clothing of Books (2016)

Books come to stand for various episodes in our lives, for certain idealisms, follies of belief, moments of love. Along the way they accumulate our marks, our stains, our innocent abuses—they come to wear our experience of them on their covers and bindings like wrinkles on our skin.

The Clothing of Books (2016)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jhumpa Lahiri (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.