Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “She was facing exile now with the same courage as she had done then, without complaining, without looking back, her eyes fixed on the future.”

— Isabel Allende

452. “El problema no estaba en conseguir la respuesta, sino en formular la pregunta precisa.”

— Isabel Allende

453. “Son implacables, predican amor, justicia y caridad, y para imponerlas cometen atrocidades.”

— Isabel Allende

454. “He had had his mouth washed out with soap so often that he stopped calling Rosette his sister, but not enough to make him stop loving her with that terrible, possessive, absolute love that solitary children give.”

— Isabel Allende

455. “I said goodbye, kissed her, and asked her forgiveness for the sins of withholding and neglect. I thanked her for having existed, promised her that she would live on in my heart, and in her son’s, begged her not to leave me, to visit me in dreams, to send me signs and clues, to return incarnated in every beautiful young woman I saw on the street, and to appear to me in spirit during the darkest hours of the night and in the days of the midday Sun.”

— Isabel Allende

456. “They’re really good people. Quakers are always to be found where they’re most needed.”

— Isabel Allende

457. “It was a long week of penitence and fasting, during which there were no card games and no music that might lead to lust or abandon; and within the limits of possibility, the strictest sadness and chastity were observed, even though it was precisely at this time that the forked tail of the devil pricked most insistently at Catholic flesh.”

— Isabel Allende

458. “The spotless order of barracks and the artificial peace of fear reigned everywhere.”

— Isabel Allende

459. “Years sneak by quickly, on tiptoe, scoffing, and suddenly they give us a fright in the mirror or smack us on the back. Every minute is precious and we can’t waste it on misunderstanding, impatience, jealousy, pettiness, or the other silly stuff that soils relationships. In truth this formula can be applied at any age because it’s always the case that our days are limited. If I had lived this.”

— Isabel Allende

460. “The path to addiction is straight and well paved;.”

— Isabel Allende

461. “The General was right. No one dies of hunger here – you reach out your hand and pluck a mango. That’s why there is no progress. Cold countries have more advanced civilizations because the climate forces people to work.”

— Isabel Allende

462. “Mario Vargas Llosa’s.”

— Isabel Allende

463. “Las aventuras sin amor me ponen triste.”

— Isabel Allende

464. “She learned to bear her troubles alone and with dignity, convinced no one was interested in other people’s problems, and that pain borne in silence eventually evaporated.”

— Isabel Allende

465. “My erotic passion is quieter now, and maybe someday it will disappear altogether; I have heard that happens with age. I don’t want to think about that possibility right now. If it happens, I hope that passion can be replaced by humor, tenderness, and camaraderie, as some of my older friends who have partners have said.”

— Isabel Allende

466. “Patriarchy is imposed with aggression; it demands obedience and punishes those who defy it.”

— Isabel Allende

467. “The young soldier was part of the “Baby Bottle Conscription,” the boys called up when there were no more men, young or old, to fight the war.”

— Isabel Allende

468. “Miss Rose has decided that Eliza would have learning, dowry, and fame as a beauty even if she was not one, because it was her view that beauty is a question of style. Any woman who conducts herself with the queenly assurance of a belle, she maintained, will convince everyone that she is beautiful.”

— Isabel Allende

469. “She had loved her husband with the fierce loyalty of someone who does not question her destiny as a wife, but becoming a widow was a liberation for her.”

— Isabel Allende

470. “Years later, when it had become the fashion to love someone from a different race or to have children without marrying, Alma admitted to herself that her greatest prejudice was that of social class, which she never managed to overcome. In spite of the.”

— Isabel Allende

471. “They all agreed that under communism they had been just as poor, but at least there was food and security, whereas independence had brought them only ruin and abandonment.”

— Isabel Allende

472. “I have been training for years to be a passionate old woman, just as others train to climb mountains or play chess.”

— Isabel Allende

473. “I was a voracious reader and what I had learned in books confirmed that the world changes constantly and humanity evolves, but the changes are only obtained after much struggle.”

— Isabel Allende

474. “The argument went on and on, and they became locked in a confused rhetorical exchange that left them exhausted, each accusing the other of being more stubborn than a mule. But in the end they kissed each other good night and both were left with the feeling that the other was an extraordinary human being.”

— Isabel Allende

475. “Chile with the purpose of finding her lover and becoming his slave forever, believing that was the way to extinguish her thirst to submit and her hidden wish for possession, but now she doubted that she could give up those new wings beginning to sprout on her shoulders.”

— Isabel Allende

476. “Alma Belasco had caught her attention. She stood.”

— Isabel Allende

477. “Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life.”

— Isabel Allende

478. “For twenty years we had center-left governments, until 1958, when the right triumphed with Jorge Alessandri, son of The Lion and completely different from his father. The Lion was a populist with advanced ideas for his time; his son was a conservative, and projected an old-maidish image.”

— Isabel Allende

479. “I think of my destiny as an expatriate. It is my fate to wander from place to place, and to adapt to new soils. I believe I will be able to do that because handfuls of Chilean soil are caught in my roots; I carry them with me always.”

— Isabel Allende

480. “Supo morir como supo vivir.”

— Isabel Allende

481. “Llorando de tristeza por todo lo perdido y riendo de alivio por todo lo ganado.”

— Isabel Allende

482. “Los soldados aguardaron, cavando trincheras y amontonando sacos de tierra y piedras para formar una barricada, no tanto por la esperanza de protegerse, sino para distraer el miedo.”

— Isabel Allende

483. “Most people live their lives without any link with the divine and do not note the signs, coincidences, premonitions, and small daily miracles in which the supernatural is manifest.”

— Isabel Allende

484. “I was born in 1920, during the influenza pandemic, and I’m going to die in 2020, during the outbreak of coronavirus. What an elegant name for such a terrible scourge.”

— Isabel Allende

485. “Poetry is what stays in your head and isn’t forgotten.”

— Isabel Allende

486. “Old age is the best moment to be and do whatever you enjoy. Soon no one will be able to bear me.”

— Isabel Allende

487. “It’s very difficult to cut the throat of some creature with which you’ve established a personal relationship, as we could attest from the time my grandfather brought home a young goat to fatten in the patio of our house and roast on his birthday. That goat died of old age. And as it turned out, it wasn’t a nanny but a male, and as soon as it grew horns, it attacked us at will.”

— Isabel Allende

488. “I told her she had run an enormous risk rescuing me, and she smiled. It was then 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.”

— Isabel Allende

489. “I need nothing, he told himself with the cunning pride of those with a calling for solitude.”

— Isabel Allende

490. “En el amor nadie piensa en la conveniencia.”

— Isabel Allende

491. “The idea that everyone was equal was fine as a theoretical slogan, he said, but in practice it was an aberration. We are not equal in the eyes of.”

— Isabel Allende

492. “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

493. “For Isaac’s protection he had a blue Turkish evil eye and a painted tin hand of Fatima hanging from the bedpost; a candle was always lit on his chest of drawers, next to Hebrew and Christian Bibles and a jar of holy water that one of the domestic staff had brought from the Shrine of Saint Jude.”

— Isabel Allende

494. “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

495. “Cada persona nace con una sola gracia la felicidad consiste en descubrirla a tiempo...”

— Isabel Allende

496. “Sometimes our fates take turns that we don’t notice in the moment they occur, but if you live as long as I have they become clear in hindsight. At each crossroads or fork we must decide which direction to take. These decisions may determine the course of the rest of our lives.”

— Isabel Allende

497. “At the end of the conflict, young people questioned gender division imposed by ultranationalism, refused to be classified as male or female, and rejected the use of gender-based pronouns in favor of nonbinary ones. This practice arrived in Europe and the United States several years later.”

— Isabel Allende

498. “Girls are denied the right to be angry and to thrash about.”

— Isabel Allende

499. “Considering the circumstances, it was a rather good kiss. In reality, it would have been perfect if they both had not been coughing from the smoke.”

— Isabel Allende

500. “It made her feel sorry for her husband: she was discovering how vulnerable to flattery a conceited old man could be.”

— Isabel Allende