Riva Sciuto

“While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination." (from "The Third and Final Continent")”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter Of Maladies

“They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album