Laura Esquivel
I watch cooking change the cook, just as it transforms the food.Collection: Food
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.Collection: Teacher
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.
What others call magic realism is normal and an everyday thing to me.
The kitchen is where we deal with the elements of the universe. It is where we come to understand our past and ourselves.
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.
The same way one tells a recipe, one tells a family history. Each one of us has our past locked inside.
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.
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.
I believe very much in sensual powers as a means of obtaining understanding.
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.
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 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.
Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.
As a very young girl, I understood that the interior activities of the home are as significant as the exterior activities of society.
For me, love is the most important force. It moves the universe.
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.
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.
There are still some natural forces that everybody understands. Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.
I started knitting in the Congress, and it was a scandal - like, big scandal.
The only way to find peace is when you are not separated, when you are not fighting, when you part of the whole.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What I find sad is that the New Age movement is primarily a commercial undertaking. But it is answering to a human need.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone's past is locked up in their recipes - the past of an individual and the past of a nation as well.
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.'
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.
We know that the hardest work is to keep yourself open to the world that technology hasn't tamed.
Food can change anything.
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.
To transform yourself is to transform your destiny.
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.
If you take a frozen box and stick it in the microwave, you become connected to the factory. We've forgotten who we are.
I like vibrant colors.
To what extent has each one of us contributed to the rise in violence and hatred?
I cook. I walk. I go to the movies. I meditate.
No one who loves life can ignore literature, and no one who loves literature can ignore life.Collection: Love Life
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.Collection: Light
You don't have to think about love; you either feel it or you don't.Collection: Love You
Keeping secrets will always lead to unhappiness and communication is the key to love.Collection: Communication
[...] each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselvesCollection: Love
To know how to produce a work of art is to know how to discard the extraneous.Collection: Art
[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.Collection: Memories
There are some things in life that shouldn't be given so much importance, if they don't change what is essential.Collection: Things In Life