Quotes from Padma Lakshmi

In the morning stillness, when the world is just waking up and your conscious mind hasn't fully taken over, you may feel a connection or passageway to another world, and a feeling that something is about to happen in yours. It's like a quiet storm is coming. You can feel the distant rumble of thunder on the horizon, yet you have no idea of the deluge your life is about to experience.

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. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the message is still driven home by the world at large.

And so I was left with a mantra, a sort of haiku version of our relationship: I don't regret one day I spent with him, nor did I leave a moment too soon.

Like many immigrants, I had always kept my Eastern and Western lives compartmentalized.

we eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts.

Cooking was something women did to nourish and nurture their families, whereas for men it was largely something they did professionally to gain money and status.

At the end of a marriage, no one wins. There is only anger, sorrow, guilt, emptiness, and defeat.

Perhaps I didn't voice my unhappiness soon enough; rather, I spent more time feeling like a disappointment and scrambling to patch our cracks than I did considering whether he required an unreasonable level of tending.

I always thought that what Rajima did with those cast-off peels was a metaphor for how she dealt with her arranged marriage. She transformed those peels, with palm sugar for sweetness and tamarind for tang, into something precious.

Every woman has a record of her body—a closet full of jeans and bras of various sizes, albums full of photographs revealing periods of weight gain and loss.

But now I was home. In my home, home home, once and for all. I had had various apartments before in quite a few cities over the course of my life, but this was the first one I owned, and it felt good. 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.

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

Hearing doctors tell you that you can't get pregnant does not extinguish the hope.

Maybe that old adage about not being able to have a good apartment, a good relationship, and a good job at the same time is true.

We throw ourselves away a little each day.

I cannot remember what we talked about except that we never stopped talking.

He was everything I wasn't. He was a lot of what I wanted to be.

At first, I was grateful to be the object of such intense desire. Yet what's flattering in the first year can be suffocating in the eighth.

I once asked her if she was happy. "That depends on what I am able to get done today," she said, laughing.

Teddy taught me about kindness, about love that is unconditional; a sentiment not dependent on acceptance, approval, or the expectation of something in return. It was the first time I would ever feel this from a man who wasn't my grandfather. And I didn't know what to do with it at all. If only I'd embraced our differences sooner. I didn't know it then, but we had so little time left.

Commitment is easy before a relationship requires compromise and obligation.

My grandfather was a closet feminist. So

A name is a marker of identity but there are markers we cannot change, like the color of our bodies.

She had sculpted the mist, the way those who have no choice do. She had willed a life for the two of us in a new land.