How many times does a person write his name in a lifetime—a million? Two million?
Belonging to another man and therefore not even a little bit to him.
Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby’s birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true. As she strokes and suckles and stu...
Whenever I can, in my study, on the subway, in bed before going to sleep, I immerse myself in Italian. I enter another land, unexplored, murky. A
When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive. Because words bring back everything: the place, the people, the life, the streets, the life, the sky,...
Though no longer pregnant, she continues, at times, to mix Rice Krispies and peanuts and onions in a bowl. For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a pe...
The next time she visits her father she’ll speak to him in English. Were her mother ever to stand before her, even if Bela could choose any language on earth in which to speak, she would have nothing...
The imperfection became a mark of distinction about their home. Something visitors noticed, the first family anecdote that was told.
The givers and keepers of Gogol’s name are far from him now. One dead. Another, a widow, on the verge of a different sort of departure, in order to dwell, as his father does, in a separate world. She...
The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator.
The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.
She wanted to shut her eyes to it. She wished the days and months ahead of her would end. But the rest of her life continued to present itself, time ceaselessly proliferating. She was made to anticipa...
She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still.
She had listened to him, partly sympathetic, partly horrified. For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family's heritage, another to hear it from him.
She believed that he would be incapable of hurting her as Graham had.
No hospital, porém um leve movimento do bebê a faz lembrar que, tecnicamente, não está sozinha. Estranha o fato de que sua criança nascerá num lugar onde as pessoas geralmente entram para sofrer ou pa...
Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.
It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, an...
It usually sits on the night table, so that I can easily look up an unknown word while I’m reading. This book allows me to read other books, to open the door of a new language. It accompanies me, even...
Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so...