Quotes from Padma Lakshmi

I was lucky to have a successful career as a model, but that was just a way to pay off my college loans.

I love to use a lot of spices when I cook, so we actually cast a real peppercorn in gold and then just made a bead out of it for necklaces and earrings.

In truth, I am a single mother. But I don't feel alone at all in parenting my daughter. Krishna has a whole other side of her family who loves her, too. And so Krishna is parented by me, but also by her grandmother and aunts and cousins and uncles and friends.

Where is it written that a smart woman can't also be stacked?

I don't have any stigma attached to my body. When I'm in my own private space, I have very little on.

When there is little you can do, you do what you can.

I could worry about his health but somehow not about my own. We throw ourselves away a little each day. Dr.

went from hoping things would work out to seeing that they were working out. I am actually doing this, I thought. Maybe I'm not just flying by the seat of my pants. I didn't want to be passive anymore, personally or professionally. In that moment, I came into being as my real and present professional self.

But now I was home. ... A roof over my head and a place to be private, to cry, to laugh, to gorge, to hope, to dream, to wallow, and to pray for things was a salve to my soul.

Back then, eating was also a means of beautification, since the more aloo tikki and murukku you consumed, the more likely you'd reach a voluptuousness akin to an American size ten or twelve, required for looking good in a sari.

I didn't know what the future held in store for me, but I felt hopeful.

The close proximity in which people lived in India was in stark contrast to my independent existence in America.

Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are.

We went back out into the night, the three of us together, skating hand in hand.

Sometimes we kid ourselves when we imagine our lives, expecting that everything will neatly fall into place.

Yet what I truly disliked, in certain gloomy moments and not always consciously, was my skin color itself

I don't really think any of us are women right when we turn eighteen, or even twenty-one for that matter. You have to live a little. I certainly tried to do that.

In the person you care for, you often see parts of the person you wish you were.

Because just as everybody is not meant to be a size 4, we all are meant to be different sizes at different times in our lives we are meant to eat different things at different moments. our needs shift as life shifts.

the more brutal or austere the diet, the harder it is to keep.

Auguste Escoffier into what we now know as the five mother sauces of French cuisine. It's funny

experienced a bout of atheism. With adolescent self-importance, I wondered why God would allow all this to happen to a fourteen-year-old girl. When

Everything I had been carting from one stage of my life to another, to remind me of me, was in the boxes that surrounded me. And there were so many of them now, just days before my thirty-seventh birthday. But so little left of me. At the end of a marriage, no one wins. There is only anger, sorrow, guilt, emptiness, and defeat.

The heart knows no pain sharper than love's arrow.