Isabel Allende > Quotes

“The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.”
― Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts

“Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende

“The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.”
― 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

“you can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction”
― Isabel Allende

“We only have what we give.”
― Isabel Allende

“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

“Words are not that important when you recognize intentions.”
― Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts

“For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time.”
― Isabel Allende, Of Love and Shadows

“You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars.”
― Isabel Allende

“Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“A man does what he can; a woman does what a man cannot.”
― Isabel Allende, Inés of My Soul

“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

“...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

“Writing is a constant exercise in longing.”
― Isabel Allende

“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

“Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. ”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“...a fixation is very stubborn: it burrows into the brain and breaks the heart. There are many fixations, but love is the worst.”
― 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

“At the most difficult moments of my life, when it seemed that every door was closed to me, the taste of those apricots comes back to comfort me with the notion that abundance is always within reach, if only one knows how to find it.”
― Isabel Allende, Paula

“Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.”
― Isabel Allende

“I need to remember to overcome.”
― Isabel Allende

“He realized...that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious. ”
― Isabel Allende, Zorro

“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

“Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story. I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses the luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone of telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia.”
― Isabel Allende, Portrait in Sepia

“We all have an unsuspected reserve of strength inside that emerges when life puts us to the test.”
― Isabel Allende, Island Beneath the Sea

“It bothers them that instead of taking on the role of abandoned lover, I have become a happy wife. They relish seeing strong women like you and me humiliated. They cannot forgive us that we triumphed where so many others fail...Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is out of balance, in favor of men. That is why they work so hard to mistreat and destroy us. But remember that bold women are like cockroaches: step on one and others come running from the corners”
― Isabel Allende, Inés of My Soul

“And I am not one of those women who trips twice over the same stone.”
― Isabel Allende, Inés of My Soul

“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 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

“If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving...”
― Isabel Allende, Paula

“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

“At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that 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. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.”
― Isabel Allende, Portrait in Sepia

“إنني أعثر على قوى جديدة لدي، ربما كانت موجودة دائماً لكنني لم أحتج لاستخدامها حتى الآن”
― 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

“I seek truth and beauty in the transparency of an autumn leaf, in the perfect form of a seashell on the beach, in the curve of a woman's back, in the texture of an ancient tree trunk, but also in the elusive forms of reality.”
― Isabel Allende, Portrait in Sepia

“You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not.”
― Isabel Allende

“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

“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

“Happiness is pure kitch; we come into the world to suffer and learn.”
― Isabel Allende, La suma de los días