Top 66 Quotes & Sayings by Laura Esquivel

What others call magic realism is normal and an everyday thing to me.

What I find sad is that the New Age movement is primarily a commercial undertaking. But it is answering to a human need.

It wasn't books that inspired me to write. For me, inspiration was simple, immediate: I got it from eating, dancing, talking. I got it from life lived, things touched, from sensuality, from love of life, from our irrefutable connection to the earth.

The only way to find peace is when you are not separated, when you are not fighting, when you part of the whole.

I believe very much in sensual powers as a means of obtaining understanding.

When I cook certain dishes, I smell my grandmother's kitchen, my grandmother's smells. I thought, 'What a wonderful way to tell a story.'

We must adjust our value systems and work to modify today's societies, in which economic interests are carried to the extreme and irrationally produce not merely objects, but weapons of war. These societies don't care about the destruction of the planet and mankind as long as they earn profits - it can't go on like this.

You'll have to forgive me this boldness, but I think women are very fortunate that men exist! The gods are very wise and certainly knew what they were doing. They created the sun and the moon, light and darkness, the eagle and the serpent, all for the same reason. They are perfect complements and the mechanism we use to reach heaven.

We know that the hardest work is to keep yourself open to the world that technology hasn't tamed.

The only way we'll know where we're going is to look at the past and to remember who we were through ceremonies and rituals.

I wanted to share my doubts and my culinary, amorous, and cosmic experiences. So I wrote 'Like Water for Chocolate,' which is merely the reflection of who I am as a woman, a wife, a mother, a daughter.

We're in a period of revolutionary change. I'm optimistic. One's self changes, and then the world changes. It's going to begin internally, not externally.

I like vibrant colors.

The kitchen is where we deal with the elements of the universe. It is where we come to understand our past and ourselves.

Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.

As a teacher I realize that what one learns in school doesn't serve for very much at all, that the only thing one can really learn is self-understanding, and this is something that can't be taught.

To transform yourself is to transform your destiny.

Cooking is one of the strongest ceremonies for life. When recipes are put together, the kitchen is a chemical laboratory involving air, fire, water and the earth. This is what gives value to humans and elevates their spiritual qualities. If you take a frozen box and stick it in the microwave, you become connected to the factory.

In film you can use images exclusively and narrate a whole story very quickly, but you don't always so easily find the form in cinema to dig deeper into human thoughts and emotions. And in a novel you can much more easily express a character's inner thoughts and feelings.

As a very young girl, I understood that the interior activities of the home are as significant as the exterior activities of society.

I started knitting in the Congress, and it was a scandal - like, big scandal.

Tradition is an element that enters into play with destiny, because you are born into a particular family - Jewish or Islamic or Christian or Mexican - and your family determines to some extent what you are expected to become. And society is always there attempting to determine the role we will play within it.

When Chipotle asked me to take part in the Cultivating Thought program both as an author and an essay contest judge, I was excited by the idea of sharing my story through this unique channel and helping young, inspiring writers do the same.

I acknowledge the four elements. Water in the North; incense to recognize the air in the East; flowers for the earth in the South; a candle for light from the West. It helps me keep perspective.

Destiny has always been something that interested me as a subject, but not in a fatalistic way because I believe that one can transform destiny through self-knowledge.

The same way one tells a recipe, one tells a family history. Each one of us has our past locked inside.

I was pretty much a hippie. I was a vegetarian, gypsy-like. I liked to meditate, and it's curious because I was very much attracted to the possibility of change.

I can't speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don't like to read essays on literature; I don't like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects.

Food can change anything.

For me, love is the most important force. It moves the universe.

Many people think spending an hour or two in the kitchen is a waste of time. But it is a good investment in your spiritual development.

I grew up in a modern home, but my grandmother lived across the street in an old house that was built when churches were illegal in Mexico. She had a chapel in the home, right between the kitchen and dining room.

What has never changed, what is always present and what is, in the end, what sustains us is that energy that I talk about in 'Like Water for Chocolate...' that loving energy. Without that, I wouldn't have had the strength to keep going and enjoy life.

If you take a frozen box and stick it in the microwave, you become connected to the factory. We've forgotten who we are.

The culinary tradition in my family is very strong. My mother, a very wise woman, spent the better part of her life in a kitchen. It's a very strong part of her identity. I grew up there next to the fire.

Progress makes us lose the feeling of a ceremony that cooking should have. It has significantly shifted our values so that now it seems to us that only activities with an economic reward are worth pursuing.

Everyone's past is locked up in their recipes - the past of an individual and the past of a nation as well.

I cook. I walk. I go to the movies. I meditate.

I am always interested in that relationship between outer reality and inner desire, and I think it is important to pay attention to the inner voice because it is the only way to discover your mission in life and the only way to develop the strength to break with whatever familial or cultural norms are preventing you from fulfilling your destiny.

There are still some natural forces that everybody understands. Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.

I watch cooking change the cook, just as it transforms the food.

To what extent has each one of us contributed to the rise in violence and hatred?

Keeping secrets will always lead to unhappiness and communication is the key to love.

Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen, for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle could be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches.

You must take care to light the matches one at a time. If a powerful emotion should ignite them all at once, they would produce a splendor so dazzling that it would illuminate far beyond what we can normally see; and then a brilliant tunnel would appear before our eyes, revealing the path we forgot the moment we were born, and summoning us to regain the divine origins we had lost. The soul ever longs to return to the place from which it came, leaving the body lifeless.

The trouble with crying over an onion is that once the chopping gets you started and the tears begin to well up, the next thing you know you just can’t stop!

It was very pleasant to savor its aroma, for smells have the power to evoke the past, bringing back sounds and even other smells that have no match in the present. -Tita

There are some things in life that shouldn't be given so much importance, if they don't change what is essential.

Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished. Then there would be the phase where she would have to sharpen her senses in order to see and hear as acutely as possible so that she could assimilate quickly all the new customs and the words most frequently used by the group she was to become a part of--so that finally, she would be judged on her own merits.

As a teacher I realize that what one learns in school doesn't serve for very much at all, that the only thing one can really learn is self understanding and this is something that can't be taught.

To the table or to bed, you must come when you are bid.

[...] each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves

Tita knew through her own flesh how fire transforms the elements, how a lump of corn flour is changed into a tortilla, how a soul that hasn't been warmed by the fire of love is lifeless, like a useless ball of corn flour.

"Only the pots know the boiling points of the broths," she says as Tita weeps into the wedding batter she is making to celebrate the marriage of her sister to her own true love.

[Words] cling to the very core of our memories and lie there in silence until a new desire reawakens them and recharges them with loving energy. That is one of the qualities of love that moves me most, their capacity for transmitting love. Like water, words are a wonderful conductor of energy. And the most powerful, transforming energy is the energy of love.

Then she cried without tears, which is said to hurt even more like dry labor.

No one who loves life can ignore literature, and no one who loves literature can ignore life.

To know how to produce a work of art is to know how to discard the extraneous.

You don't have to think about love; you either feel it or you don't.

Words travel as swiftly as desire, so it is possible to send a message of love without them.