"Write what should not be forgotten."
— Isabel Allende

"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night."
— Isabel Allende

""you can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction"
"
— Isabel Allende

"'There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,' my mother explained shortly before she left me. 'If you can remember me, I will be with you always.'"
— Isabel Allende (Eva Luna)

"Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are."
— Isabel Allende

"We only have what we give."
— Isabel Allende

"Writing is a constant exercise in longing."
— Isabel Allende

"When love exists, nothing else matters, not life’s predicaments, not the fury of the years, not a physical winding down or scarcity of opportunity."
— Isabel Allende

"Words are not that important when you recognize intentions."
— Isabel Allende (City of the Beasts)

"Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change."
— Isabel Allende

"Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul."
— Isabel Allende

"She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself."
— Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits)

""This is to assuage our conscience, darling" she would explain to Blanca. "But it doesn't help the poor. They don't need chartiy; they need justice.""
— Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits)

"Isabel Allende, who envisions the future world like this:

"I see a more feminine world, a world where feminine values will be validated, the same as masculine values are. A more integrated world. I see that in the future, things that we have lost in the past will be recovered. There's a search for those things, a search for spirituality, for nature, for the goddess religions, for family and human bonding. All that has been lost in this industrial era. People are in desperate need of those things. I don't think the world will destroy itself in a nuclear cataclysm. On the contrary, we have the capacity to save ourselves and save the planet, and we will use it."

And who says, "Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken."

And, she says, "You are the storyteller of your own life and you can create your own legend or not."

And, "Write what should not be forgotten.""
— Isabel Allende

"Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. "
— Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits)

"...memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously."
— Isabel Allende

"The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything."
— Isabel Allende (City of the Beasts)

"Erotica is using a feather; pornograpy is using the whole chicken."
— Isabel Allende

"The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seems natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear . . ."
— Isabel Allende

"My name is Eva, which means 'life,' according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory."
— Isabel Allende (Eva Luna)

"She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying."
— Isabel Allende (Eva Luna)

"Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me."
— Isabel Allende (The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir)

""The names of persons and living creatures demand respect, because when we speak to them we touch their heart and become a part of thier life force.""
— Isabel Allende (The Stories of Eva Luna)

"After a few months without writing, months I've lived turned outward... I fear going deaf, not being able to hear the silence.
"
— Isabel Allende

"I have a hundred-year-old aunt who aspires to sainthood, and whose only wish has been to go into the convent, but no congregation, not even the Little Sisters of Charity, could tolerate her for more than a few weeks, so the family has had to look after her. Believe me, there is nothing so insufferable as a saint, I wouldn't sic one on my worst enemy."
— Isabel Allende (Mi Pais Inventado: Un Paseo Nostalgico por Chile)

"You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found."
— Isabel Allende (THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS)

"That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities."
— Isabel Allende (Eva Luna)

"I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me."
— Isabel Allende (Eva Luna)

"Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentacostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy."
— Isabel Allende (Mi Pais Inventado: Un Paseo Nostalgico por Chile)

"The last time I was in Chile, I was hypnotized by a friend who is studying to be a curandero, a healer, who led me back through several incarnations. It wasn't easy to return to the present, however, since my friend hadn't reached that part of the course, but the experiment was well worth the effort because I discovered that in former lives I was not Genghis Khan, as my mother believes."
— Isabel Allende (Mi Pais Inventado: Un Paseo Nostalgico por Chile)

"He had only to touch me to turn my tears into sighs and my anger to desire. How accomodating love is; it forgives everything.
"
— Isabel Allende

"She was considered timid and morose. Only in the country, her skin tanned by the sun and her belly full of ripe fruit, running through the fields with Pedro Tercero, was she smiling and happy. Her mother said that that was the real Blanca, and that the other one, the one back in the city, was a Blanca in hibernation."
— Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits)

"Heroism is a badly remunerated occupation, and often it leads to an early end, which is why it appeals to fanatics or persons with an unhealthy fascination with death. "
— Isabel Allende (Zorro)

"They could not understand the advantage of living contrary to their inclinations in this world in order to enjoy a hypothetical well-being in another. "
— Isabel Allende (Zorro)

"It is common knowledge that no man that women flock to boasts of his conquests. Those who do, lie. "
— Isabel Allende

"
She asked herself a thousand times why she had hungered so desperately to belong body and soul to Joaquin Andieta when truth she had never been totally happy in his arms, and could explain it only in terms of first love. She had been ready to fall in love when he came to the house to unload some cargo; the rest was instinct. She had merely obeyed the most powerful and ancient of calls, but it had happened an eternity ago and seven thousand miles away. Who she was then and what she had seen in him she could not say, only that now her heart was far away from there. Not only was she tired of looking for him but deep down she did not want to find him; at the same time, though, she could not go on riddled with doubt. She needed an ending for that phase in order to begin a new love with a clean slate
"
— Isabel Allende (Daughter of Fortune)

"I need to remember to overcome."
— Isabel Allende

"His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference."
— Isabel Allende (Daughter of Fortune: A Novel)

"Sadness and boredom were more bearable than the effort of living a normal life. Perhaps the idea of death began to hover over her during that period, as a kind of higher order of lassitude in which she would not have to move the blood in her veins or the air in her lungs; her repose would be absolute—not to think, not to feel, not to be."
— Isabel Allende (Eva Luna)

"Perhaps it was at that moment I realized that mine is a war with no end in view; I might as well fight it cheerfully or I would spend my life waiting for some distant victory in order to be happy."
— Isabel Allende (Eva Luna)

"He knew by experience that he absorbed everything, that every event was imprinted in his memory, but that sometimes months or years passed before he realized how deeply an episode had marked him. It was as if memory congealed somewhere, then suddenly, through some mechanism of association, appeared before his eyes with blinding intensity."
— Isabel Allende (Eva Luna)

"Las palabras son gratis, decía y se las apropiaba, todas eran suyas. ella sembró en mi cabeza la idea de que la realidad no es sólo como se percibe en la superficie, también tiene una dimensión mágica y, si a uno se le antoja, es legítimo esagerarla y ponerle color para que el tránsito por esta vida no resulte tan aburrido. --Eva Luna "
— Isabel Allende

"My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's. "
— Isabel Allende (My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile)

"Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages"
— Isabel Allende (My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile)

"I've been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent stories to keep from boring the psychologist."
— Isabel Allende (Mi Pais Inventado: Un Paseo Nostalgico por Chile)

"Apa yang tidak kugoreskan di atas kertas akan terhapus oleh waktu."
— Isabel Allende

"[D]as Gedächtnis [ist] schwach und der Lauf eines Lebens kurz und alles [geschieht] so rasch, dass wir den Zusammenhang zwischen den Ereignissen nicht mehr sehen, die Folgen der Taten nicht mehr ermessen können, wir glauben an die Fiktion der Zeit, an Gegenwart, Vergangenheit und Zukunft, aber es kann auch sein, dass alles gleichzeitig geschieht [...]"
— Isabel Allende (La casa de los espíritus)

"[Der] ziellose Blick eines Menschen, der sich ausschließlich von Gemüse ernährt."
— Isabel Allende (La casa de los espíritus)

" إن الذاكرة خيال نختار أكثر مافيها تألقاً وأكثر مافيها قتامةً متجاهلين ما يخجلنا ونحوك هكذا سجادة حياتنا العريضة. "
— Isabel Allende

"[D]ie Leute [lesen] nichts, was sie nicht interessiert, und wenn sie etwas interessier[t], [sind] sie auch reif dafür."
— Isabel Allende (La casa de los espíritus)