Top 100 Isabel Allende Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. My life is about ups and downs, great joys and great losses.
Isabel Allende
#7. 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
#8. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. What can we do with this happiness that appears for no obvious reason, the joy that needs no cause to exist?
Isabel Allende
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I feel that telling my secrets makes me less vulnerable. What would make me vulnerable are the secrets I keep.
Isabel Allende
#27. People are afraid of falling in love because they don't want to suffer.
Isabel Allende
#28. 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
#29. 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
#31. Nostalgia is my vice. Nostalgia is a melancholy, and slightly saccharine, sentiment, like tenderness
Isabel Allende
#32. As Sancho said, money does not buy happiness but it does buy nearly everything else.
Isabel Allende
#33. 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
#35. I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.
Isabel Allende
#36. Typical Chilean characteristics, such as sobriety, a horror of ostentation, of standing out over others or attracting attention, generosity, a tendency to compromise rather than confront, a legalistic mentality, respect for authority, resignation to bureaucracy, enthusiasm for political argument,
Isabel Allende
#37. Someone has said that conversation is sex for the soul.
Isabel Allende
#38. 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
#39. Society decides when we get old. But the spirit never ages.
Isabel Allende
#40. I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you're from or what you did before.
Isabel Allende
#42. I never try to convey a message, I just want to tell a story. Why that story in particular? I have no idea, but I have learned to surrender to the muse. I become obsessed with a theme or with certain stories; they haunt me for years, and finally, I write them.
Isabel Allende
#43. Far away from my country I would be like those trees they chop down at Christmastime, those poor rootless pines that last a little while and then die.
Isabel Allende
#44. Tell Larry I'm not going to the reception, and that he can't count on me for anything for the rest of my life.
Isabel Allende
#45. 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
#46. I love my dog unconditionally, but never the man I'm sleeping with.
Isabel Allende
#47. I have become an American citizen, and I love this country. I think that this country has incredible potential for goodness, an incredible possibility for doing the wrong thing, too.
Isabel Allende
#48. Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion.
Isabel Allende
#49. 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
#50. Although women do two-thirds of the world's labor, they own less than one percent of the world's assets.
Isabel Allende
#51. 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
#52. I haven't forgotten. But if I fail you, you can rely on Cathy.
Isabel Allende
#53. I am very grateful for the success, because it has given me the freedom to write without pressure, in my own way, and has enabled me to maintain my family and educate my children and grandchildren, as well as to create a Foundation to empower women and girls.
Isabel Allende
#54. 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
#55. It's easy to judge others when we are not going through the same thing.
Isabel Allende
#56. I was a romantic and sentimental creature, with a tendency towards solitude.
Isabel Allende
#57. 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
#58. Feminism has never been sexy, but let me assure you that it never stopped me from flirting, and I have seldom suffered from lack of men.
Isabel Allende
#59. She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh
Isabel Allende
#60. Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally.
Isabel Allende
#61. On a Tuesday, September 11th, 1973, we had the military coup in Chile that forced me to leave my country eventually. And then, on a Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, we had the terrorist attack in the United States.
Isabel Allende
#62. They would regret that they had not killed him; he would get out of that hole and find Juliana sooner or later, even if he had to pursue her to hell itself. "Oh, you won't have to go that far, we are on our way to California," Diego said in farewell
Isabel Allende
#63. A slave lacks incentives; for him it is better to work slowly and badly, since his effort benefits only the master, but free people work hard to save and get ahead,, that is their incentive.
Isabel Allende
#64. He almost caused a riot among the ladies; he filled all the empty space, as if someone had let a tiger loose in this world of female longing. Even
Isabel Allende
#65. 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
#66. Everything I write has to be connected to my life. One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women.
Isabel Allende
#67. 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
#68. There is no death, daughter.
People die only when we forget them.
Isabel Allende
#69. I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.
Isabel Allende
#70. You only have what you give. It's by spending yourself that you become rich.
Isabel Allende
#71. I feel that my life and therefore my writing accept the possibility of all the mystery. Everything we don't know; everything that can possibly happen.
Isabel Allende
#72. Every person is born with a talent, and happiness depends on discovering that talent in time ...
Isabel Allende
#73. At five I was already a feminist, and nobody used the word in Chile yet.
Isabel Allende
#74. I get thousands of letters, and they give me a feeling of how each book is perceived. Often I think I have written about a certain theme, but by reading the letters or reviews, I realise that everybody sees the book differently.
Isabel Allende
#75. 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
#76. Before I start writing, before I have an idea of where and when the story happens, I research it thoroughly.
Isabel Allende
#77. 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
#78. I have a foot here and a foot in some spirit world. There are many more layers to reality, and that permeates my life and my writing in a very natural way. I don't even think about it.
Isabel Allende
#79. I would like to have been born a man, so I could leave too.
Isabel Allende
#80. Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you.
Isabel Allende
#81. 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
#82. I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.
Isabel Allende
#83. 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
#84. If you change the way you tell your own story, you can change the colour and create a life in technicolour.
Isabel Allende
#85. His lifetime was less than a fraction of a second in infinity. Or maybe he did not even exist; maybe human beings, the planets, everything in Creation were a dream ... an illusion. He smiled with humility when he remembered ...
Isabel Allende
#86. We all have an unsuspected reserve of strength inside that emerges when life puts us to the test.
Isabel Allende
#89. All you will have is the present. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.
Isabel Allende
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. The first two, three, four weeks are wasted. I just show up in front of the computer. Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too. If she doesn't show up invited, eventually she just shows up.
Isabel Allende
#93. He had a presentiment that their fates would be intertwined, but immediately rejected it; he always tried to avoid falling into the traps of intuition.
Isabel Allende
#95. I read on my iPad when I travel. I listen to audiobooks in the car. I read books in my bedroom, where I have a comfortable couch, a lamp and two dogs to keep me warm.
Isabel Allende
#96. A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons.
Isabel Allende
#98. 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
#99. Just as Daniel Balalcazar said, it makes no sense to suffer in advance a misfortune that may never occur.
Isabel Allende
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