Life & Wisdom Quote by Jhumpa Lahiri

A relationship is not a moral alibi. Lahiri’s line is spare, almost clinical, and that’s the point: it refuses the soft-focus storytelling we often use to excuse intimacy. We like to believe closeness confers goodness - that loving someone, or being bound to them by family, culture, or marriage, automatically scrubs our choices clean. Lahiri cuts that fantasy down to size with a single, legal-sounding verb: “preclude.” It’s the language of rules and exclusions, not romance. Morality doesn’t get disqualified just because feelings are involved.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of the way people weaponize connection: I couldn’t have meant harm, I’m not that kind of person, we’re family, we have history. Lahiri suggests the opposite: relationships are precisely where ethical pressure intensifies, because the stakes are higher and the power dynamics more intimate. Harm in a relationship can be easier to rationalize, harder to name, and more costly to confront.

Contextually, this tracks with Lahiri’s fiction, which often lives in the charged space between private desire and public duty - immigration, marriage, infidelity, generational expectation. Her characters don’t get cartoon-villain choices; they get compromises that feel inevitable until they don’t. The quote’s intent isn’t to moralize from a distance; it’s to insist that tenderness and wrongdoing can coexist in the same room. Love may explain behavior, but it doesn’t absolve it.