Laura Esquivel Quotes & Sayings

#1. What she liked the most about drinking was not being present, that feeling of self-evasion, of disconnection, of liberation, of escape. Alcohol offered her an excellent alternative to being herself without actually dying.

Laura Esquivel

#2. To know how to produce a work of art is to know how to discard the extraneous.

Laura Esquivel

#3. She was passionate about knitting because it allowed her to reach a state of peacefulness, and she loved to embroider because it let her express her creativity. Both activities were liberating. They allowed her to exist outside of time.

Laura Esquivel

#4. To the table or to bed, you must come when you are bid.

Laura Esquivel

#5. 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

#6. During her childhood Tita didn't distinguish between tears of laughter and tears of sorrow. For her, laughing was a form of crying.

Laura Esquivel

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

Laura Esquivel

#8. Gertrudis got on her horse and rode away. She wasn't riding alone
she carried her childhood beside her, in the cream fritters she had enclosed in a jar in her saddlebag

Laura Esquivel

#9. At a certain point in his life he stopped searching for himself in everything that exists and gave in to temptations. Or, as you say, he sinned and later fled.

Laura Esquivel

#10. 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

Laura Esquivel

#11. The only thing that had saved her then was knitting. In prison she had become a compulsive knitter. Knitting allowed her to unite, to connect, to integrate. With every stitch she held on to dear life. Threads hold us together.

Laura Esquivel

#12. Ironing was an act of annihilation in which wrinkles would die and give way to order: something she required more than anything.

Laura Esquivel

#13. The simple truth is that the truth does not exist, it all depends on a persons point of view.

Laura Esquivel

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

Laura Esquivel

#15. That's why it's important to keep your distance from people who have frigid breath. Just their presence can put out the most intense fire, with results we're familiar with. If we stay a good distance away from those people, it's easier to protect ourselves from being extinguished.

Laura Esquivel

#16. Tita knew through her own flesh how fire transforms the elements, how a lump of corn flour is changed into a tortilla, how a soul that hasn't been warmed by the fire of love is lifeless, like a useless ball of corn flour.

Laura Esquivel

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

Laura Esquivel

#18. Being able to listen to unrepeatable secrets, wishes, and desires wasn't as wonderful as it seemed ... being aware of what other people felt at every moment would come to cause him a lot of headaches, and huge disappointments in love.

Laura Esquivel

#19. Nothing had spared her from being mocked for wetting her pants, not even the fact that she had rushed to the delegado's aid.

Laura Esquivel

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

Laura Esquivel

#21. Words travel as swiftly as desire, so it is possible to send a message of love without them.

Laura Esquivel

#22. Words have life, memory, when you hear them you travel to the past

Laura Esquivel

#23. Whoever controls information, whoever controls meaning, acquires power

Laura Esquivel

#24. 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

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

Laura Esquivel

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

Laura Esquivel

#27. The trouble with crying over an onion is that once the chopping gets you started and the tears begin to well up, the next thing you know you just can't stop.

Laura Esquivel

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. The time it took to prepare didn't matter, because there is no such thing as wasted time in the kitchen
rather that is where we go to recover lost time.

Laura Esquivel

#31. "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.

Laura Esquivel

#32. Take care to chop the onion fine.

Laura Esquivel

#33. 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

#34. But there was nothing more transparent to her than the fear of not being loved, the fear of being unseen, of being ignored.

Laura Esquivel

#35. One is never truly alone, even when our only company is our thoughts, because what are thoughts if not the memory of interactions with others?

Laura Esquivel

#36. 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?

Laura Esquivel

#37. 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

#38. The most elementary of good manners ... at a social gathering one does not bring up the subject of personalities, sad topics or unfortunate facts, religion, or politics.

Laura Esquivel

#39. Carefully studying the delicate form of the doll, she was thinking how easy it was to wish for things as a child. Then nothing seemed impossible. Growing up, one realizes how many things one cannot wish for, the things that are forbidden, sinful. Indecent.

Laura Esquivel

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

Laura Esquivel

#41. No matter how successful a relationship may be, both sexually and emotionally, the lack of money can hamper and undermine, little by little, even the greatest passion.

Laura Esquivel