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Exotic Quotes

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Exotic Quotes

“All worries are less with wine.”

“Oh honey, someday a real man is going to make you see stars and you won't even be looking at the sky." Excerpt from Grace Willow's Last Minute Bride”

“You are enough to drive a saint to madness or a king to his knees Excerpt from To Kiss a King by Grace Willows Coming this summer to Amazon Kindle and paperback.”

“Love, the exotic bird, came and went. Heart forgot love. Joy, the majestic willow, wept and died. Mind forgot joy. Hope, the basement lamp, fell and broke. Soul forgot hope. Self, the anxious caterpillar, took flight and dropped. Self forgot self. You, my all, became all my reasons. Reasons left. You left. I never forgot.”

“You are enough to drive a saint to madness or a king to his knees.”

“Hunger gives flavour to the food.”

“Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.”

“She was a ray of sunshine, a warm summer rain, a bright fire on a cold winter’s day, and now she could be dead because she had tried to save the man she loved.”

“Time to cut the cake, newlyweds." Caroline ushers us over to the sweet little two-tier cake, round and covered in white fondant with what appear to be traditional henna tattoo patterns drawn on it in pale gold. We take the mother-of-pearl-handled knife, apparently the one Caroline and Carl used at their wedding, and, his hand on mine, cut a small slice. We feed each other a generous bite, marveling at the tender almond cake with the poached apricots and white chocolate mousse, light-as-air buttercream scented with vanilla and orange blossom water.”

“Afterwards, Ada turned slow cartwheels on the terrace, watching the world change kaleidoscopically from purple to orange as the queen's crepe myrtles took turns with the hibiscus. The gardener was sweeping the lawn and his helper was cleaning down the curved cane chairs on the wide verandah. Ordinarily, cartwheeling was one of Ada's favorite things to do, but this afternoon her heart wasn't in it. Rather than enjoying the way the world spun around her, she felt dizzy, even queasy. After a time, she sat instead on the edge of the verandah near the spider lilies.”

“Ada tore open the package to find a small black leather book inside. Between its covers were no words, but instead page after page of pressed flowers: orange hibiscus, mauve Queen's crepe myrtle, purple passionflower, white spider lilies, red powder puffs. All of them, Ada knew, had come from her very own garden, and in an instant she was back in Bombay. She could feel the sultry air on her face, smell the heady fragrance of summer, hear the songs of prayer as the sun set over the ocean.”

“Our tapas look exquisite: little squares of spiced honey-cake decorated with goat's cheese and roast pears, chicken livers on port on slices of potato with onion marmalade, rolled up radicchio with honey and haddock. Ben has been to buy some boxes from the patisserie to stow our treasures. The exotic menu is made up of taramasalata, roulade of tuna and capers, salad of peppers sautéed in garlic, and aubergine caviar. It isn't very exotic for an inhabitant of the Balkans but it probably would be for someone from Vietnam or Brittany. The giant salad really is a giant: there's a whole meal in it, from the first course to the dessert and all that with no rice and no tinned sweet corn. Slivers, slivers of all sorts of different things- vegetables, cheese, fruit- all blended without crushing each other, side by side without working against each other.”

“I put a handful of Criollo beans into the grinder. Their scent is very far from sweet. I can smell oud, and sandalwood, and the dark scents of cumin and ambergris. Seductive, yet faintly unsavory, like a beautiful woman with unwashed hair. A moment in the grinder, and the beans are ready to use. Their volatile essence fills the air, freed from one form into another. The Maya tattooed their bodies, you know, in order to placate the wind. No, not the wind. The gods. The gods. I add hot water to the beans and allow them time to percolate. Unlike coffee beans, they release an oily kind of residue. Then I add nutmeg, cardamom and chili to make the drink that the Aztecs called xocoatl- bitter water. That bitterness is what I need.”

“Of all the names that linger in my memory after a long journey, this one is the dearest to me (Therapia). Perhaps because it sounds so Greek, blithe as a swelling paean to carefree days spent on lovely shores? Perhaps because it came at the beginning and now belongs to a long ago, glorified time-for the journey had just begun.”

“Even the narrow canals around the Rialto teemed with floating shops- a small barge piled with jumbled green grapes, a boat heaped with oranges and limes, and another listing under a mountain of melons. I jogged along, drunk on all the colors and smells of the known world: pyramids of blood oranges from Greece, slender green beans from Morocco, sun-ripened cherries from Provence, giant white cabbages from Germany, fat black dates from Constantinople, and shiny purple eggplants from Holland.”

“Then just when I thought I was going to really break down for a good cry, I remembered a large bag of pistachio nuts in the back of the pantry. I don't know what made me think of them. I had hidden them beneath several packages of dried pasta. Sam liked pistachio nuts. I bought them for a cake recipe I had seen in Gourmet. I stood up like a sleepwalker, my hands empty of sheets or shoes. I would take care of all this once the cake was in the oven. The recipe was from several months ago. I didn't remember which issue. I would find it. I would bake a cake. My father liked exotic things. On the rare occasions we went out to dinner together over the years, he always wanted us to go to some little Ethiopian restaurant down a back alley or he would say he had to have Mongolian food. He would like this cake. It was Iranian. There was a full tablespoon of cardamom sifted in with the flour, and I could imagine that it would make the cake taste nearly peppered, which would serve to balance out all the salt. I stood in the kitchen, reading the magazine while the sharp husks of the nuts bit into the pads of my fingers. I rolled the nut meat between my palms until the bright spring green of the pistachios shone in my hands, a fist full of emeralds. I would grind the nuts into powder without letting them turn to paste. I would butter the parchment paper and line the bottom of the pan. It was the steps, the clear and simple rules baking, that soothed me. My father would love this cake, and my mother would find this cake interesting, and Sam wouldn't be crazy about it but he'd be hungry and have a slice anyway. Maybe I could convince Camille it wasn't a cake at all. Maybe I could bring them all together, or at least that's what I dreamed about while I measured out the oil.”

“I'm being probably naïve, but I would like to think that once something moves you and you have an emotional involvement with it, and you see some relevance in it to your own life, then it's a little bit harder, maybe, to look at the people that produced it as being just exotic others that don't have any connection to you or relevance to you.”