Umami Quotes

“Nobody warns you aobut this, but the dead, or at least some of them, take customs, decades, whole neighborhoods with them. Things you thought you shared but which turn out to be theirs. When death does you part, it's also the end of what's mine is yours.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“In my mind, you always died yesterday.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“If all else fails,’ I would say to Noelia in the periodic moments when it seemed that this time I wasn’t going to finish an article, let alone get through the protracted process of revision, sending, editing, rejection, guaranteed humiliation, etc., etc., that academic life implies, ‘let’s go and live by the sea and I’ll grow papayas.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“That's one thing I've learned about food through pure empirical research: food is a patriot. Under no circumstances will it be replicated outside of its mother country.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“Me gusta la palabra hastío. La entiendo como esto, como esta hora en que lo único despierto son las moscas.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“Translation simplifies, it schematizes: something that seemed potentially profound falls from grace and lands on its head, turning out to be nothing but a doodle. For Marina, this law of gravity dictating bilingualism confirms what she’s always suspected: that if gringos were drawings, they’d be drawn with markers. And”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“Translation simplifies, it schematizes: something that seemed potentially profound falls from grace and lands on its head, turning out to be nothing but a doodle.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“Not even remotely. It was an anthropological essay on the relationship between the fifth taste and pre-Hispanic food. Do you even know which mews you live in?’ ‘Yes,”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“Everyone knows that a horoscope is like a shell: it needs to be wide and hollow enough to accommodate exactly what we need to hear...

Its capacity for multiple interpretations – wasn't a failing. On the contrary, this was the characteristic – the only one, but still – it shared with all great literature: its universal ambition.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“The world is full of iotas, iguanas, indents, ignoramuses, indoctrinators, imposers, ifs and illusions. If you ask me, we’re nothing but a bunch of idiots.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“Pentimento, they call it in drawing: those strokes the artist tried to erase but which are still faintly visible.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“you only realize you’ve been somewhere else once you’re back.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“Lately, some nights, before falling asleep, Marina tries out some of the affirmations suggested by her therapist. She tends to stop after a minute because she struggles saying the same thing over and again, and all too soon the affirmations turn into something else entirely.

‘I am a beautiful and productive woman; I am an artist. I am a fruitful and defective woman; I am an artiste. I am a fearful and resentful zoo-man; I am a sadist. I am a dutiful representative of batshit; I am batshit, I am zoo shit. I am a fruity loopy arsonist.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“But most of all, she respects Linda for having renounced the product mentality. For having said, ‘Enough is enough.’ Or at least that’s how Linda explained it:

‘One day I just said enough is enough to the product mentality, you know? It’s not that I’m giving up playing, I just don’t need to package it. I devote myself to the music now, not the orchestra. I’m all about the process now.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“It’s the color scheme of that first afternoon—that white panorama full of potential, that threshold white—that Marina understands as whomise. And that’s what she’s trying to recreate now, a year and a bit later, with a series of expensive light bulbs. ‘White light,’ the packaging promised. She fits them one by one throughout the house, and unbeknown to her, choreographs the slow dance of light-over-puddle in the passageway.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“That’s one thing I’ve learned about food through pure empirical research: food is a patriot. Under no circumstances will it be replicated outside of its mother country.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“Before they clashed, my mom used to teach Marina English. She tried to teach Dad too, back when they met, but his pronunciation still sucks. According to him, on principle you should distrust any language that uses the same word for libre and gratis. When”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“I wish my dad had walked out on us.'
'You don't mean that.'
'I do. He was a dad to remember, not to keep; he still is.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“The exhaustion the family collapsed into after he'd walked off slamming the door, like a kind of post-coital bliss, only post-violence. A silence so passive it felt like peace.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“But they were wrong and so was I: Noelia died and life goes on. A miserable life if you like, but I still eat, and I still shit.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“Si tú dices rana, yo salto.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“Tal vez es sólo eso el amor. O la escritura: el esfuerzo por poner a una persona en palabras a sabiendas de que nadie es para los otros más que un caleidoscopio: sus mil reflejos en el ojo de una mosca.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami