Top 100 Isabel Allende Quotes
#1. I was a political refugee living in Venezuela. I had a job that was twelve hours a day, no money. It was a hard time.
Isabel Allende
#2. I tried and tried to sleep, lulled by the movement, the purring of the motor, and the snores of the other passengers, but it's never been easy for me to sleep, and much less now, when I still have residues of the wild life running through my veins.
Isabel Allende
#3. The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing.
Isabel Allende
#4. I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres.
Isabel Allende
#5. I remember my childhood as a horrible time. My mother says that nothing so horrible ever happened to me as the things that I remember.
Isabel Allende
#6. I feel that telling my secrets makes me less vulnerable. What would make me vulnerable are the secrets I keep.
Isabel Allende
#7. I want to have an epic life. I want to tell my life with big adjectives. I want to forget all the grays in between, and remember the highlights and the dark moments.
Isabel Allende
#8. As Sancho said, money does not buy happiness but it does buy nearly everything else.
Isabel Allende
#9. When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.
Isabel Allende
#10. 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
#11. Happiness is slippery, it slithers away between your fingers, but problems are something you can hold on to, they've got handles, they're rough and hard
Isabel Allende
#12. I write a letter to my mother every day, because in that letter, I write down my day. And if I don't write it down, then tomorrow I will forget it and it's gone.
Isabel Allende
#13. I was a romantic and sentimental creature, with a tendency towards solitude.
Isabel Allende
#14. I thought liberation had to do with going out into the world and assuming male duties, not with delegating part of my load. The result was a terrible fatigue, as witnessed today by the millions of women of my generation who question feminist movements.
Isabel Allende
#15. Everything that has to do with food is sensuous. In the United States, however, we are eating all the time. We have a problem with obesity. And yet, we don't enjoy food that much.
Isabel Allende
#16. At five I was already a feminist, and nobody used the word in Chile yet.
Isabel Allende
#17. You only have one life, but if you live it well, that's enough. The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy?
Isabel Allende
#18. I would like to have been born a man, so I could leave too.
Isabel Allende
#19. 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
#20. Friendship is all about trust and sharing. Passionate and romantic love is all about sex and emotions. You have to try to combine those, I think. The great marriages, the great couples I know, have both.
Isabel Allende
#21. He had a principle: if you lend money and never see the person again, that's money well spent.
Isabel Allende
#22. It was then that I understood that the days of Colonel Garcia and all those like him are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women (Allende 429)
Isabel Allende
#23. I was alone, without a single cent, in an unknown country. If I'd learned anything from last year's ill-fated adventures, though, it was not to get overwhelmed by minor inconveniences.
Isabel Allende
#24. Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed.
Isabel Allende
#25. The one that came really easy was the Japanese lover, because he's like a ghost in the book. He's always in the background like a spirit, like a shadow, almost. There's a very delicate line there.
Isabel Allende
#26. I met a guy, very exotic to me - he was blonde with blue eyes - and I just had a fling that turned out to be love. I moved to San Francisco to spend a week with him and get him out of my system; I'm still here 26 years later.
Isabel Allende
#27. Feminism is not dead, by no means. It has evolved. If you don't like the term, change it, for Goddess' sake. Call it Aphrodite, or Venus, or bimbo, or whatever you want; the name doesn't matter, as long as we understand what it is about, and we support it.
Isabel Allende
#28. A novel is like a window, open to an infinite landscape.
Isabel Allende
#29. The concept that you could possess land was as unfathomable to them as that of dividing up the sea.
Isabel Allende
#30. I think that my life changed at 50. Many things happened. Menopause, the end of youth and my daughter died that year after being a whole year in a coma. So I think that I changed and I became an elder at 50.
Isabel Allende
#31. I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.
Isabel Allende
#32. The connection that I have with my readers makes me very happy, and gives meaning to the strange profession of writing
Isabel Allende
#33. Not only serve the meal, they offer to cut the meat.
Isabel Allende
#34. Our demons lose their power when we pull them out of the depths where they hide and look them in the face in broad daylight.
Isabel Allende
#35. Childhood is a naturally unhappy period of our existence, Lillian. It was Walt Disney who invented the notion that it has to be happy, simply to make money.
Isabel Allende
#36. Only in romance novels or in thrillers people live outside of a social and political context.
Isabel Allende
#37. You're one of a kind, Kate!" Alex said, and smiled.
"We all are, Alexander.
Isabel Allende
#38. 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
#39. He hoped that none of his descendants would get mixed up in politics, which was a trade for butchers and bandits.
Isabel Allende
#40. The slave who dances is free ... while he is dancing.
Isabel Allende
#41. No complaining about how hard it is to write, we are all so, so lucky to write, to sit down, inside, and write words on paper. There is no greater freedom, no greater good, nothing that brings more joy.
Isabel Allende
#42. She accused him of having grandiose ideas and sloppy habits, a fatal combination for a writer.
Isabel Allende
#44. If I had to choose between a relative and a good story, I would take the story.
Isabel Allende
#45. This was a matter of some small group of guerrillas in some distant caves, a primitive, fanatical, and desperate people who didn't have the resources to intimidate the United States.
Isabel Allende
#46. Peace requires everyone to be in the circle - wholeness, inclusion.
Isabel Allende
#47. alive who have read the three complete volumes of the ageless epic La Araucana, in rhyme and old Spanish.
Isabel Allende
#48. My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.
Isabel Allende
#49. The advantage of being lovers is that we have to work hard at our relationship, because everything conspires to drive us apart. Our decision to be together has to be renewed again and again; that keeps us on our toes.
Isabel Allende
#50. You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found.
Isabel Allende
#51. The property adjoined the bay, and when the tide came in it was possible to go kayaking, which some of the residents not yet disabled by their infirmities were happy to do. This is how I would like to live, thought Irina, taking deep breaths of the sweet aroma of pines and laurels.
Isabel Allende
#52. He understood then that all his exploits as a reporter, the feats that had won him such recognition and fame, were merely an attempt to keep his most ancient fears at bay, a stratagem for taking refuge behind a lens to test whether reality was more tolerable from that perspective.
Isabel Allende
#53. Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. They only make good former spouses.
Isabel Allende
#54. According to Cecilia, Valdivia's star rose when he met me and began to decline when he left me behind, a frightening theory because I do not want the glory for his successes or the guilt for his failures. Each of us is master of his or her own destiny.
Isabel Allende
#55. A man does what he can; a woman does what a man cannot.
Isabel Allende
#56. And the truth is that if a writer is successful, you gain readers. It benefits all the writers. It's important for all the writers that as many of us as possible be successful.
Isabel Allende
#57. All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.
Isabel Allende
#58. The two moments are much alike: birth and death are made of the same fabric.
Isabel Allende
#59. Years later my Popo would laugh and tell people that if she hadn't knocked him out in the first round, he'd still be wandering around in love with the stars.
Isabel Allende
#60. Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it.
Isabel Allende
#61. His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference.
Isabel Allende
#62. Giving women education, work, the ability to control their own income, inherit and own property, benefits the society. If a woman is empowered, her children and her family will be better off. If families prosper, the village prospers, and eventually so does the whole country.
Isabel Allende
#63. Writing, when all is said and done, is an attempt to understand one's own circumstance and to clarify the confusion of existence, including insecurities that do not torment normal people, only chronic nonconformists, many of whom end up as writers after having failed in other undertakings.
Isabel Allende
#64. Life is long, and the world is large. It is all a question of taking a chance.
Isabel Allende
#65. Indiana was such a devout disciple of Shakti that she had once considered taking her name until her father, Blake Jackson, managed to convince her that a Hindu goddess's name was not appropriate for a tall, voluptuous blond American with the looks of an inflatable doll.
Isabel Allende
#66. The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.
Isabel Allende
#67. He was not oppressed by a crowd because in the midst of all the hullabaloo he always found a quiet place for his soul.
Isabel Allende
#69. Color prejudice is so strong that if a woman has yellow hair, even if she has the face of an iguana, men turn to look at her in the street.
Isabel Allende
#70. His wife ... always dressed in mourning for the children who died in infancy and squeezed breathless by the pressure of her corset, her religion, and the husband fate had dealt her
Isabel Allende
#71. I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.
Isabel Allende
#72. I went to a mystery writers conference ... and I learned a lot not only from the faculty - and in the faculty we had forensic doctors, detectives, policemen, experts in guns, etc. - but from the questions of the students.
Isabel Allende
#73. The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down.
Isabel Allende
#74. If this world is going to be a better place for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it will be women who make it so.
Isabel Allende
#75. We are too connected. There's noise in our heads all the time.
Isabel Allende
#76. I have the idea that we grandmothers are meant to play the part of protective witches; we must watch over younger women, children, community and also, why not? this mistreated planet, the victim of such unrelenting desecration.
Isabel Allende
#77. Writing is like riding a bicycle: you don't forget how, even if you go for years without doing it.
Isabel Allende
#78. Fiction happens in the belly, it doesn't happen in the brain.
Isabel Allende
#79. The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.
Isabel Allende
#80. Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.
Isabel Allende
#81. I tried to show my affection and gratitude with small attentions, but he would not allow it; he was not used to receiving affection, although it was his nature to squander it on others.
Isabel Allende
#83. Conceit is a privilege of the ignorant; the wise man is humble because he knows how little he knows.
Isabel Allende
#84. Words are free, she tried to say, and she appropriated them; they were all hers.
Isabel Allende
#85. The point was not to die, since death came anyway, but to survive, which would be a miracle.
Isabel Allende
#86. Some people connect with a story and may find between the lines something that might be useful to him or her, but that's not the intention of the author, I think. At least not mine.
Isabel Allende
#87. I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the U.S. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family.
Isabel Allende
#89. I'm interested in people who have to overcome obstacles, people who are not sheltered by the umbrella of the establishment, marginals.
Isabel Allende
#90. It was an election year and there was reason for concern over the turn of events. The country was waking up. The wave of discontent that was stirring the people was beginning to strike at the heart of that oligarchic society.
Isabel Allende
#91. True friendship resists time, distance and silence.
Isabel Allende
#92. My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left.
Isabel Allende
#93. Gringos invented two terms that are untranslatable into most languages: "snack" and "quickie," to refer to eating standing up and loving on the run . . . that, too, sometimes standing up.
Isabel Allende
#94. Her stoic attitude contributed to the air of mystery surrounding her, long before she had any secrets to keep.
Isabel Allende
#96. My female protagonist will not be this promiscuous, beautiful, dark-haired, thin lady. It will be a plump, blond, healer and so forth.
Isabel Allende
#97. I have been a woman for 46 years and I only recently realized I can't change it and I like it.
Isabel Allende
#98. Of all fragrances, the sweetest is that of virtue.
Isabel Allende
#99. I had a very rough childhood and not a happy one and by age 15 I was an old person in many ways. I knew that I had to take care of myself, I um and I always did.
Isabel Allende
#100. I would like to be with my husband together sitting somewhere in a lonely place in the woods and take something, maybe some pills or something, a magic potion and die together.
Isabel Allende
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