Top 100 Allende's Quotes
#1. In other words: Allende's work is bad, but it's alive; it's anaemic, like a lot of Latin Americans, but it's alive. It won't live long, like many sick people, but for now it's alive. And there's always the possibility of a miracle.
Roberto Bolano
#2. I need to tell a story. It's an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later.
Isabel Allende
#4. My father says that fear is good; it's the body's alarm system, it warns us of danger. But sometimes danger can't be avoided, and then you have to forget about being afraid.
Isabel Allende
#5. I have experience and I am employing it in the service of a Chilean road for Chile's problems. We always take advantage of experience wherever it comes from, but adapting it to our reality. I am putting it to use in a Chilean way, for the problems of Chile. We are not anyone's mental colonists.
Salvador Allende
#6. We are too connected. There's noise in our heads all the time.
Isabel Allende
#7. I'm not a fan of mysteries, so to prepare for this experience of writing a mystery I started reading the most successful ones in the market in 2012 ... And I realized I cannot write that kind of book. It's too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there's no redemption there.
Isabel Allende
#8. Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.
Isabel Allende
#9. You would give your life for your little baby. It's not the same when you are in a sexual relationship unless you feel that you are loved as you love.
Isabel Allende
#10. I'm very optimistic because I think that the real strength of a nation like the United States comes from blending cultures. There's no way that you can close the frontiers anywhere. The borders are there to be violated permanently.
Isabel Allende
#11. You write a book and it's like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You don't know if it will ever reach any shores. And there, you see, sometimes it falls in the hands of the right person.
Isabel Allende
#12. 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
#13. I write until the first draft is finished, and then I feel that I can get out. But, during the time of the writing of the first draft, I don't go out. I'm just locked away, writing. It's a time of meditation, of going into the story.
Isabel Allende
#14. 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
#15. THE HONEYEATER story was mesmerizing: the story took hold of me and I felt compelled to write it. I was also inspired by a few female authors (among them, Doris Lessing and Isabel Allende) I've admired over the years
women who preceded me and who gave me the courage to even begin.
Yolanda A. Reid
#16. My books are based on emotions, feelings, relationships. In these areas women are experts, so it's not strange that the main characters of my novels are females.
Isabel Allende
#17. 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
#18. The media could do a much better job, that's for sure, especially the media that targets women ... Human rights? They couldn't care less!
Isabel Allende
#19. 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
#20. Life is very mysterious and there are many things we don't know. And there are elements of magic realism in every culture, everywhere. It's just accepting that we don't know everything and everything is possible.
Isabel Allende
#21. A man who cooks is very sexy. A woman who cooks is not that sexy. Because it's associated in our mind to the domestic cliche of the woman.
Isabel Allende
#22. My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.
Isabel Allende
#23. Many children fly like birds, guess other people's dreams, and speak with ghosts, but ... they all outgrow it when they lose their innocence.
Isabel Allende
#24. I'm not willing to sign a contract. They want everything. They want the rights to do the movie and everything else they can think of, forever. There's no limit to the contract. In this universe and universes to be discovered - I'm not making this up - this is in the contract.
Isabel Allende
#25. I don't think of literature as an end in itself. It's just a way of communicating something.
Isabel Allende
#26. When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.
Isabel Allende
#27. I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better.
Isabel Allende
#28. She has a fixation on love. Strong trouble. The girl left her window open one clear night and it crawled into her body while she was asleep. There's no spell can cure it.
Isabel Allende
#29. In the United States, the fact that you can start again gives a lot of energy and strength and youth to this country. That is why it's so powerful in many ways, and so creative.
Isabel Allende
#30. A memoir is an invitation into another person's privacy.
Isabel Allende
#31. I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?
Isabel Allende
#32. There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It's the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that's why they get noticed.
Isabel Allende
#33. And I've gained spirituality. I'm aware that before, death was is the neighborhood. Now, it's next door, or in my house. I try to live mindfully and be present in the moment.
Isabel Allende
#34. Take. Her designs would be more refined than Vera's, because she did not intend to satisfy popular taste and create a brand, but to create for pleasure. The possibility of earning a living never occurred to her. She wasn't interested in scarves for ten dollars, or sheets
Isabel Allende
#35. Sisters: talk to each other, be connected and informed, form women's circles, share your stories, work together, and take risks. Together we are invincible.
Isabel Allende
#36. Everybody has losses - it's unavoidable in life. Sharing our pain is very healing.
Isabel Allende
#37. It's such an intimate and profound relationship that it cannot be unconditional. I can only compare the intimacy of sex with the intimacy of the mother with a newborn baby. But with a newborn baby, it is unconditional.
Isabel Allende
#38. I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason.
Isabel Allende
#39. Naturally, I asked him what it'd been like to live through Pinochet's coup and the fall of Allende. Naturally, he regarded me with an expression of utter boredom; then he said:
'Like a Marx Brothers' movie, but with corpses. Unimaginable pandemonium.
Javier Cercas
#40. But that's how nostalgia is: a slow dance in a large circle. Memories don't organize themselves chronologically, they're like smoke, changing, ephemeral, and if they're not written down they fade into oblivion.
Isabel Allende
#41. There are a lot of good people in the world but they keep quiet about it, it's bad ones that make noise a lot if noise and they get noticed.
Isabel Allende
#43. 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
#44. What happens in the world affects me. Sometimes, that's part of the writing.
Isabel Allende
#45. 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
#46. Twittering and blogging and all that is fine, but there is no idea of how to phrase something beautifully; how to use language to create an emotion. It's just passing information and sometimes very superficial information.
Isabel Allende
#47. 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
#48. I was born in the middle of World War II, the middle of the Holocaust; I was born when there was no declaration of human rights, when feminism was not an issue, when children were working in factories. I mean, today's world is a better place!
Isabel Allende
#49. If you write nonfiction, a historical account of what really happened, first of all, it's always white men who do that, and you don't have the voices that are really interesting to me, of the people who are not sheltered by the big umbrella of the establishment.
Isabel Allende
#50. Happiness is not exuberant or noisy, like pleasure or joy; it's silent, tranquil, and gentle; it's a feeling of satisfaction inside that begins with self-love.
Isabel Allende
#51. 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
#52. Love is a condition that tends to cloud men's reason, but it is not fatal. Usually all the patient needs is to have his love returned, and he will snap out of it and begin to sniff the air in search of new prey
Isabel Allende
#53. The Popular Unity government represented the first attempt anywhere to build a genuinely democratic transition to socialism a socialism that, owing to its origins, might be guided not by authoritarian bureaucracy, but by democratic self-rule.
Salvador Allende
#54. The fear is not real, Dil Bahadur; it is only in your mind, like all other things. Our thoughts form what we believe to be reality.
Isabel Allende
#55. 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
#56. It's going to go away because we all need silence. We all need time to reflect and think. I am not at all pessimistic about this.
Isabel Allende
#58. What can we do with this happiness that appears for no obvious reason, the joy that needs no cause to exist?
Isabel Allende
#59. In my book tours I get to meet an audience every night. And I see that there are mostly young people, and there are a lot of more men than before, but always young, I don't get older men. As I'm getting older, my audience gets younger!
Isabel Allende
#60. I rebelled against all form of authority, against my grandfather, my step-father, the Church, the police, the government, the bosses. Everything male that was there, and was determining my life.
Isabel Allende
#61. 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
#62. I never try to give a message in my books. It's about living with characters long enough to hear their voices and let them tell me the story. Sometimes I would love to have a happy ending, and it doesn't happen because the character or the story leads me in another direction.
Isabel Allende
#63. Very few old folk are happy, Irina. Most of them are poor, aren't healthy, and have no family. It's the most fragile and difficult stage of life, more so than childhood, because it grows worse day by day, and there is no future other than death.
Isabel Allende
#64. Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compresses to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy ...
Isabel Allende
#65. When my daughter Paula died, I was in the deepest pain, and my mother said, "This kind of sorrow is like a long, narrow, dark channel. You have to walk this channel alone and be sure that there is light at the other ending. Just keep walking."
Isabel Allende
#66. The strong aroma of meat, fried onion, cumin, and baked dough soaked into my skin so deeply that I have never lost it. I will die smelling like an empanada.
Isabel Allende
#67. How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?
Isabel Allende
#68. 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
#70. We've lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions without meaning.
Isabel Allende
#71. Their most notable defect was that they considered work a virtue, even manual labor. They were materialists, conquerors, and they were infused with a messianic enthusiasm for reforming those who did not think as they did; they did not, however, represent an immediate threat to civilization. No
Isabel Allende
#72. My life is about ups and downs, great joys and great losses.
Isabel Allende
#73. 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
#74. At my age, people prefer to stay in a relationship that is not working. I do not understand that. I think it takes a lot of courage to separate. But it takes more energy to stay in something that is not working.
Isabel Allende
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. He's a woman!" he shouted, horrified.
Padre Mendoza and the others came running up, only to stand and stare, mute with amazement, at the virginal breasts of the warrior.
"It's going to be much more difficult to kill him now," Padre Mendoza sighed finally.
Isabel Allende
#78. He missed his venerable master, who had marked him forever with a thirst for knowledge as persistent as the drunk's thirst for alcohol or the ambitious man's thirst for power. He no longer had his mentor's library or his inexhaustible fount of experience.
Isabel Allende
#80. At my age days dissolve like salt in water; the day's gone and I don't even know what I've done with the hours.
Isabel Allende
#81. When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture.
Isabel Allende
#82. 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
#83. Americans have a warrior's mentality, most of them. That's how this society was built. The fact that you own a gun and shoot to defend your life is a very American way of thinking.
Isabel Allende
#84. When a man's earning his living doing things he doesn't like, he feels like a slave; when he's doing what he loves, he feels like a prince.
Isabel Allende
#85. I am an American citizen and it is my home now. I like the U.S.A., which is not a place too many people have liked since Bush. The U.S. has a young population, and everything can change within a year.
Isabel Allende
#86. 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
#87. I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it.
Isabel Allende
#88. He had a principle: if you lend money and never see the person again, that's money well spent.
Isabel Allende
#89. 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
#90. Having a point to start is important. You know that when you decide to write something it's like a commitment. It's like falling in love.
Isabel Allende
#91. 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
#92. You only have what you give. It's by spending yourself that you become rich.
Isabel Allende
#93. It's easy to judge others when we are not going through the same thing.
Isabel Allende
#94. 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
#95. Although women do two-thirds of the world's labor, they own less than one percent of the world's assets.
Isabel Allende
#97. 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
#98. His wife, Leanne, who came to his waist, looked like an undernourished adolescent with the face of a fly, but her fragility was deceptive: she had given birth to six male children and was expecting the seventh. She knew it would be male because God was determined to test her patience.
Isabel Allende
#99. People are afraid of falling in love because they don't want to suffer.
Isabel Allende
#100. I feel that telling my secrets makes me less vulnerable. What would make me vulnerable are the secrets I keep.
Isabel Allende
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