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.

Laura Esquivel

Society Men Family

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.

Laura Esquivel

Life Art Zen

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.

Laura Esquivel

Teacher Very Understanding

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.

Laura Esquivel

Who Where Were

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.

Laura Esquivel

Love Life Art

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.

Laura Esquivel

Men Knowledge Art

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

Laura Esquivel

Technology Nature Values

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.

Laura Esquivel

Women Men God

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.

Laura Esquivel

Strength Life Change

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.

Laura Esquivel

Society Men Family

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

Laura Esquivel

Movies Walk T

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

Laura Esquivel

Society Home Young

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

Laura Esquivel

Violence Us Tribute

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

Laura Esquivel

Food Change Watch

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.

Laura Esquivel

Knowledge Ways Way

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

Laura Esquivel

Very Thing Thin

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

Laura Esquivel

Work Technology Yourself

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

Laura Esquivel

History Family Way

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.

Laura Esquivel

Age You Whole

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.

Laura Esquivel

Strength Relationship Life

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

Laura Esquivel

Love Verse Universe

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

Laura Esquivel

Food can change anything.

Laura Esquivel

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

Laura Esquivel

I like vibrant colors.

Laura Esquivel

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.

Laura Esquivel

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.

Laura Esquivel

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

Laura Esquivel

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

Laura Esquivel

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

Laura Esquivel

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.

Laura Esquivel

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.

Laura Esquivel

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.

Laura Esquivel

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.

Laura Esquivel

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

Laura Esquivel

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.

Laura Esquivel

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.

Laura Esquivel

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

Laura Esquivel

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.'

Laura Esquivel

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.

Laura Esquivel

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.

Laura Esquivel

To transform yourself is to transform your destiny.

Laura Esquivel

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

Laura Esquivel