Love, Loss, and What We Ate Quotes

“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.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“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.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“In the car inching its way down Fifth Avenue, toward Bergdorf Goodman and this glamorous party, I looked back on my past with a new understanding. This sickness, the “endo-whatever,” had stained so much—my sense of self, my womanhood, my marriage, my ability to be present. I had effectively missed one week of each month every year of my life since I was thirteen, because of the chronic pain and hormonal fluctuations I suffered during my period. I had lain in bed, with heating pads and hot-water bottles, using acupuncture, drinking teas, taking various pain medications and suffering the collateral effects of them. I thought of all the many tests I missed in various classes throughout my education, the school dances, the jobs I knew I couldn’t take as a model, because of the bleeding and bloating as well as the pain (especially the bathing suit and lingerie shoots, which paid the most). How many family occasions was I absent from? How many second or third dates did I not go on? How many times had I not been able to be there for others or for myself? How many of my reactions to stress or emotional strife had been colored through the lens of chronic pain? My sense of self was defined by this handicap. The impediment of expected pain would shackle my days and any plans I made.

I did not see my own womanhood as something positive or to be celebrated, but as a curse that I had to constantly make room for and muddle through. Like the scar on my arm, my reproductive system was a liability. The disease, developing part and parcel with my womanhood starting at puberty with my menses, affected my own self-esteem and the way I felt about my body. No one likes to get her period, but when your femininity carries with it such pain and consistent physical and emotional strife, it’s hard not to feel that your body is betraying you. The very relationship you have with yourself and your person is tainted by these ever-present problems. I now finally knew my struggles were due to this condition. I wasn’t high-strung or fickle and I wasn’t overreacting.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“we eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“Like many immigrants, I had always kept my Eastern and Western lives compartmentalized.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“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.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“I once asked her if she was happy. “That depends on what I am able to get done today,” she said, laughing. She told me that the completion of her daily tasks was the only thing she felt she had control over. They were a form of meditation, of salve. Kept busy, she had no time to ruminate and no time for opinions, certainly not feminist ones. I pressed her: “I mean, are you happy with your life, Rajima?” “I don’t know,” she said uncomfortably, as if she’d never really considered such a question. “When there is little you can do, you do what you can.” Happiness for my grandmother seemed to be a verb rather than a noun. She had so little control over her own life. Yet she took control, out of thin air for herself, when she could.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“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.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“I could worry about his health but somehow not about my own. We throw ourselves away a little each day.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“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.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“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.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“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.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“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.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“Commitment is easy before a relationship requires compromise and obligation.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“A name is a marker of identity but there are markers we cannot change, like the color of our bodies.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“I once asked her if she was happy. “That depends on what I am able to get done today,” she said, laughing.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“Hearing doctors tell you that you can’t get pregnant does not extinguish the hope.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“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.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“He was everything I wasn’t. He was a lot of what I wanted to be.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“I cannot remember what we talked about except that we never stopped talking.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“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.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“The insidious reasons for a brown girl’s self-loathing won’t be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations—and what they mean about your worth—might not dawn on you while you’re playing cricket in the sand. What’s at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“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.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“At the end of a marriage, no one wins. There is only anger, sorrow, guilt, emptiness, and defeat.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“We throw ourselves away a little each day.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“Indeed, food and femininity were intertwined for me from very early on. Cooking was the domain not of girls, but of women. You weren’t actually allowed to cook until you mastered the basics of preparing the vegetables and dry-roasting and grinding the spices. You only assisted by preparing these mise en places for the older women until you graduated and were finally allowed to stand at the stove for more than boiling tea. Just as the French kitchens had their hierarchy of sous-chefs and commis, my grandmother’s kitchen also had its own codes. The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentils. You went from wearing skirts and half saris to wearing full saris, and at about the same time you got to make the rice-batter crepes called dosas for everyone’s tiffin. You did not get told the secret ratio of spices for the house-made sambar curry powder until you came of marriageable age. And to truly have a womanly figure, you had to eat, to be voluptuously full of food.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“just because a point is well made, doesn’t mean it’s right.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“Sometimes we kid ourselves when we imagine our lives, expecting that everything will neatly fall into place.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“I once asked her if she was happy. “That depends on what I am able to get done”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“My grandfather was a closet feminist. So,”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir