Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Love doesn’t grow like a wild plant, it needs a lot of care.”

— Isabel Allende

452. “It’s hard to make money working; and the harder the work, the worse the pay. It takes effort not to lose everything and end up on the street. It’s easy, on the other hand, to get rich without producing anything, moving money from one place to another, speculating, taking advantage of stock opportunities, investing in the hard work of others.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

454. “Estaba harta de contemplar desde abajo los vellos de la nariz del resto de la humanidad.”

— Isabel Allende

455. “Many of us daughters have had to live the lives that our mothers could not.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

457. “Nathaniel Belasco had photographed his wife between 1977 and 1983, using one of the first twenty-by-twenty-four Polaroids capable of capturing the tiniest details with the utmost precision.”

— Isabel Allende

458. “In 1920 a political leader was elected who for the first time preached social justice: Arturo Alessandri Palma, nicknamed The Lion. He came from a middle-class family of second-generation Italian immigrants.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

460. “I wait for you to complete the voyage into yourself, for the old wounds to heal. I know that when you return from your nightmares, we shall again walk hand in hand, as before.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “Ya no es necesario, podemos ejercer nuestro poder desde la feminidad. Como Eliza, adquirimos libertad y seguimos luchando para preservarla, ampliarla y lograr que alcance para todas.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

467. “There’s no feminism without economic independence.”

— Isabel Allende

468. “I realized also that in Nahuel, that town of hospitable neighbors, you only had to scratch the surface to uncover the ugliest of vices, though my mentors insisted that cruelty wasn’t inherent to the human condition, merely something born of ignorance and poverty. “It’s much easier to be generous with a full belly than an empty one,” they said. I’ve never believed that, though, because I’ve seen that both kindness and cruelty exist everywhere.”

— Isabel Allende

469. “In Chile it is bad manners to acknowledge that you’re overly satisfied, because that can irritate the less fortunate, which is why for us the correct answer to the question “How are you?” is “So-so.” That is an opening for sympathizing with the other speaker’s situation.”

— Isabel Allende

470. “All husbands are boring... No woman with ounce of sense gets married to be entertained, she marries to be maintained.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

472. “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

473. “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

474. “I was so drained I felt as if I were staring through a telescope at the light of a star dead for a million years.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

476. “Affection must be cultivated, Camilo; it has to be watered and tended like a plant, but we’d let ours dry up.”

— Isabel Allende

477. “Don’t think you’re so special – remember that the nail that sticks out is the one the hammer hits.”

— Isabel Allende

478. “The Inquisition railed against the Mapuches for their polygamous customs, but overlooked the harems of captive Indian women accompanying the Spaniards: more mestizo children meant more subjects for the crown of Spain and more souls for the Christian religion. From those violent embraces come our peoples, and to this day men act as if they were on horseback surveying the world from on high, giving orders, conquering.”

— Isabel Allende

479. “We have something weird in our brains, a sort of tumor that propels us toward love. We can’t live without it. Out of love we put up with children and men. Our self-denial is a form of servitude. Have you noticed that individualism and selfishness are considered positive traits in men and defects in women? We.”

— Isabel Allende

480. “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

481. “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

482. “That is s-s-s-something.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

484. “To dismantle the system that sustains civilization is very difficult and takes time, but we are achieving it, bit by bit. The complex and fascinating task of inventing a new order to replace it is long.”

— Isabel Allende

485. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

488. “My grandfather was an exception among Chileans because no man from the middle class up knows how to decipher a manual, nor does he dirty his hands with motor oil – that’s what maestros are for; they can improvise ingenious solutions with the most modest resources and a minimum of fuss.”

— Isabel Allende

489. “I took the opportunity to tell her about you, a stupendous young man, sensible and of solid principles, handsome, hardworking, and intelligent. Etelvina, who was serving the pie, froze with the knife in the air and asked me who I was talking about.”

— Isabel Allende

490. “Our homeland is where our dead are buried.”

— Isabel Allende

491. “Gervasio Lonquimay.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

494. “Like a luminous spiderweb, Popo. The threads of that web connect everything that exists. I can’t explain it to you. When you die, you’re going to travel like that comet, and I’ll be right behind, attached to your tail.” “We’ll be astral dust.”

— Isabel Allende

495. “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

496. “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

497. “He was thirty-eight years old, and he was ready to change his life.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

500. “My maternal aunts and uncles, the Barros, were twelve rather eccentric brothers and sisters, though none was hopelessly mad.”

— Isabel Allende