Quotes from Laura Esquivel

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

To transform yourself is to transform your destiny.

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.

When you're told there's no way you can marry the woman you love and your only hope of being near her is to marry her sister, wouldn't you do the same?

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

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.'

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

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

"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.

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

Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves

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

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.

Necesito una respuesta en este momento, el amor no se piensa, se siente o no se siente.

La mera verdad es que la verdad no existe, todo depende del punto de vista.

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

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

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.

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