Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “I am grateful to that unhappy childhood because it provided ample material for my writing. I don’t know how novelists with happy childhoods in normal homes manage.”

— Isabel Allende

452. “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

453. “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them,” wrote Margaret Atwood.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

455. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

457. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

460. “I related my impressions of La Paz, its purple mountains, its hermetic Indians, and its air, so thin that your lungs are always on the verge of filling with foam and your mind with hallucinations.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

462. “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

463. “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

464. “No, literature was definitely not a reasonable career path in a country like Chile where intellectual scorn for women was absolute.”

— Isabel Allende

465. “I grew up surrounded with secrets, mysteries, whispers, prohibitions, matters that must never be mentioned.”

— Isabel Allende

466. “Gervasio Lonquimay.”

— Isabel Allende

467. “What I learned then helps now in my writing: working under pressure, conducting an interview, doing research, using the language efficiently. I never forget that a book is not an end in itself. Just like a newspaper or a magazine, a book is a means of communication, which is why I try to grab the reader by the throat and not let go to the end.”

— Isabel Allende

468. “During the years he spent in Venezuela he thought he had once and for all overcome the solemnity that had been an essential part of his nature from childhood, as though he was in mourning for all the world’s suffering, violence and evil. Faced with so many disasters, happiness seemed to him obscene. In love with Roser in the green, warm country of Venezuela, he had vanquished the temptation to cloak himself in sadness.”

— Isabel Allende

469. “I didn’t get to prepare myself as well as I would’ve liked, and now there’s a lady, who must be death, sitting at the foot of my bed, motioning for me to follow her. I can’t distinguish clearly between night and day, and it doesn’t matter, because pain and memory aren’t measured with clocks. The morphine puts me to sleep and transports me to the dimension of dreams and visions.”

— Isabel Allende

470. “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

471. “I don’t look bad despite my age, do I? The few friends I have left look like iguanas.”

— Isabel Allende

472. “Ya no es necesario, podemos ejercer nuestro poder desde la feminidad.”

— Isabel Allende

473. “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

474. “That night, faced with the incontrovertible results, Pinochet, hardened by the arrogance of absolute power and cut off from reality by many years of complete impunity, proposed another coup to keep himself on the presidential throne indefinitely.”

— Isabel Allende

475. “Life was beautiful, and America was truly “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” a land where someone like Gregory could become President; all you had to do was stay pure of heart, love God and your mother, be forever faithful to one girl, respect the law, defend the weak, and scorn money – because heroes never expected to be compensated.”

— Isabel Allende

476. “You’ve completely forgotten what it takes to raise a child, Mr. Bogart. And this girl is traumatized – she misses her mother, she’s been pulled away from everything she knows, her family, her friends, her school, her community, her language. Can you imagine what that must be like?”

— Isabel Allende

477. “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

478. “He had a principle: if you lend money and never see the person again, that’s money well spent.”

— Isabel Allende

479. “She embellished the facts, because she was aware that life is.”

— Isabel Allende

480. “In my case, it’s not so much wanting to live in Chile as it is the desire to recapture the certainty I feel there. That’s my home ground.”

— Isabel Allende

481. “The parties of the left joined together in a coalition called the Unidad Popular, which included the Communist Party. The United States was alarmed despite the results of polls giving the victory to the right, and it designated several million dollars for defeating Allende.”

— Isabel Allende

482. “El individualismo se consideraba una forma de demencia.”

— Isabel Allende

483. “The road of gluttony leads straight to lust and, if traveled a little farther, to the loss of one’s soul.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

485. “He had a principle: if you lend money and never see the person again, that’s money well spent. Morgana aroused mixed feelings of fascination.”

— Isabel Allende

486. “Love doesn’t grow like a wild plant, it needs a lot of care.”

— Isabel Allende

487. “Exert some independence; you’re not a little girl. You can’t let anyone else decide things for you. You have to take care of yourself in this world,” she said.”

— Isabel Allende

488. “It was a long night, perhaps the longest in my life. I spent it sitting next to Rosa’s tomb, speaking with her, accompanying her on the first part of her journey to the Hereafter, which is when it’s hardest to detach yourself from earth and you need the love of those who have remained behind, so you can leave with at least the consolation of having planted something in someone else’s heart.”

— Isabel Allende

489. “We spent a good part of the twentieth century trying out various forms of revolution, from Marxism to savage capitalism, ranging through each and every intermediate shading. Our hope that a change in government can improve our luck is like hoping to win the lottery: totally without rational foundation.”

— Isabel Allende

490. “Pentru mine a fost o surpriza sa descopar ca lumea e violenta si pradalnica, guvernata de legea implacabila a celor mai puternici. Selectia naturala n-a servit la inflorirea inteligentei si la evolutia spiritului, cu prima ocazie ne casapim reciproc, exact ca sobolanii inchisi intr-o cusca prea mica.”

— Isabel Allende

491. “The Isabel Allende Foundation.”

— Isabel Allende

492. “I have lived in a rough sea where waves would lift me and then drop me to the bottom.”

— Isabel Allende

493. “Blanca argued that her reading should be monitored because there were certain things that were inappropriate for her age, but 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

494. “As well as walking erect and disguising his tiredness, he also tried to avoid other symptoms of old age: meanness, mistrust, ill temper, resentment, and bad habits such as no longer shaving every day, repeating the same stories over and over, talking about himself, his ailments, or money.”

— Isabel Allende

495. “Advanced age is a distortion of a familiar reality, it changes the body as well as circumstances.”

— Isabel Allende

496. “I lived in a state of contained fury that didn’t manifest in tantrums or door slamming, only eternal, accusing silence.”

— Isabel Allende

497. “Irina could not imagine the courage it took to grow old without becoming too frightened; her knowledge of age.”

— Isabel Allende

498. “No one gives you anything in life, Teresa would say, you have to take it by force, and as soon as you get careless they’ll take it back.”

— Isabel Allende

499. “Economic and military power, which is the kind of power that counts, has always remained in the same hands.”

— Isabel Allende

500. “The CIA orchestrated a plan to prevent Allende from assuming the presidency. First it tried to bribe members of Congress not to designate Allende and to call for a second vote.”

— Isabel Allende