Laura Esquivel Quotes

We are building our own tradition of families for which we demand respect.

I think there's a misconception that all Asian-American experiences are the same. My experiences with my family and the way they wanted me to know my culture are not the same as others.

Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life.

The purity of Jewish upbringing - the restrictions that one carries through life being a 'nice Jewish girl' - what a burden.

I grew up in a very old-fashioned Roman Catholic, Italian-Irish family in Philly.

When I was growing up, we spoke Egyptian, we ate Egyptian food, we had other Egyptian friends. It was my father's preference.

Customs form us all, our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs; are consequences of our place of birth.

My father named me Kelli because 'Kelli O'Hara' just sounded so Irish.

My mom came to the U.S. very young, and then she married very young. But she was never American. She was always Scottish and would make sure that I knew that I was, too.

The greatest guarantee for the preservation of a person’s identity is language and faith, and all Armenians must carry these two values.

I am an ordinary woman from a Tamil family.

I lived a very, very Middle Eastern life until I was in my early 20s. It was very sheltered.

Sometimes in Asian homes it is all about where we've come from, which is important too, but it is about where you live and where you're born and the people who are the same as you.

My parents always wanted me to learn about my culture and tried to make me eat Vietnamese food.

I didn't come from a very rigid background, where there's a clan or a tribe or a religion.

I asked my mother, 'Why shouldn't I act?' She said, 'Nobody in the family has acted, so why should you?'

Nothing is more acceptable than what we are born into.

Culture is everything you don't have to do.

You ought to be ashamed of yourself, running around, not married, staying out all night. Ashamed!" "Ashamed!" my grandmother echoed. Good to know they still agreed on things after forty-three years of marriage.

We arrange our lives-even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited-with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right.

I was born in Okinawa, but on a U.S. Army base. And my father is Japanese-American which means that he is second generation, but my mom was born in the Philippines and raised in Okinawa. So, how do you know where you are generationally from? I can claim all three legitimately, but I like to say that I am third generation American.

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession

We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature.

Women serve as guardians of culture, upholders of society.

Whenever one honestly defies a tradition, one becomes, in reality, the more responsible to it.