The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri

"For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding." (p. 50)

"She has the gift of accepting her life; as he comes to know her he realizes that she has never wished she were anyone other than herself, raised in any other place, in any other way. This, in his opinion, is the biggest difference between them, a thing far more foreign than the beautiful house she'd grown up in, her education at private schools." (p. 138)

"At forty-eight she has come to experience the solitude that her husband and son and daughter already know, and which they claim not to mind. 'It's not such a big deal,' her children tell her. 'Everyone should live on their own at some point.' But Ashima feels too old to learn such a skill. She hates returning in the evenings to a dark, empty house, going to sleep on one side of the bed and waking up on another." (p. 161)

"It's one of the things she's always hated about life here: these chilly, abbreviated days of early winter, darkness descending mere hours after noon. She expects nothing of days such as this, simply waits for them to end." (p. 163)

"'Will you remember this day, Gogol?' ... 'How long do I have to remember it?' ... 'Try to remember it always,' he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. 'Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.'" (p. 187)

"She does not fault him for this. Such omissions of devotion, of affection, she knows now, do not matter in the end. She no longer wonders what it might have been like to do what her children have done, to fall in love first rather than years later, to deliberate over a period of months or years and not a single afternoon, which was the time it had taken for her and Ashoke to agree to wed." (p. 279-280)