Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

452. “Supo morir como supo vivir.”

— Isabel Allende

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

457. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

459. “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

460. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

462. “But do you know what I’m most grateful for? Love. That has marked me more than anything else. I was incredibly lucky to have Roser. She’ll always be the love of my life. Thanks to her I have Marcel. Being a father has also been essential for me; it’s allowed me to keep faith in what’s best in the human condition.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

464. “I can’t criticize mothers’ obsessive love because that’s probably the only reason why species have survived, from bats to technocrats. Nor.”

— Isabel Allende

465. “More than forty years ago Bella Abzug, the famous activist and congresswoman from New York, summarized the above in one sentence: “In the twenty-first century women will change the nature of power instead of power changing the nature of women.” My.”

— Isabel Allende

466. “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

467. “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

468. “El sabio es siempre alegre.”

— Isabel Allende

469. “Creo que ha decidido morirse, y la ciencia no tiene remedio alguno contra ese mal.”

— Isabel Allende

470. “The truth is that men control political and economic power – they make the laws and apply them at their convenience –.”

— Isabel Allende

471. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

475. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

478. “According to the Dalai Lama, the only hope for peace and prosperity lies in the hands of women in the West.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

480. “He was proud of his calloused hands with cracked nails and dry red skin. “Working hands, honest hands,” he’d say.”

— Isabel Allende

481. “Suggestion works miracles.”

— Isabel Allende

482. “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

483. “I could never have invented such a clan. Actually, I had no need to, with a family like mine you don’t need imagination.”

— Isabel Allende

484. “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

485. “El calendario es un invento humano; el tiempo a nivel spiritual no existe...”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

487. “That is what I am attempting in my stumbling spiritual practice: to rid myself of the negative feelings that prevent walking with assurance. I want to transform rage into creative energy and guilt into a mocking acceptance of my faults; I want to sweep away arrogance and vanity.”

— Isabel Allende

488. “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

489. “Dicen que nunca se termina un libro, que simplemente el autor se da por vencido.”

— Isabel Allende

490. “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

491. “The Belascos’ garden remained deaf to the defamatory propaganda campaign against the Japanese, who were accused of unfair competition against American farmers and fishermen, threatening white women’s virtue with their insatiable lust, and corrupting American society by their Oriental, anti-Christian ways.”

— Isabel Allende

492. “The simple recipe for success that Mendel had instilled in his children from the cradle on consisted in never complaining, never asking for anything, striving to be the best in everything you do, and never trusting anyone.”

— Isabel Allende

493. “But beyond confusion and rage, the strongest feeling I remember having that night was frustrated desire, because I would never be able to satisfy my need to run my hands over Rosa’s body, to penetrate her secrets, to release the green fountain of her hair and plunge into its deepest waters.”

— Isabel Allende

494. “She knew the strange healing power words had from what she had written and discussed concerning her brother Enrique’s fate – how important it was to share one’s pain and discover that others too had their fair share of it, that lives are often alike and feelings similar.”

— Isabel Allende

495. “My excesses are different but, like Julia, I will not give them up. My mother used to say that the only regrets in our old age are the sins we didn’t commit and the things we didn’t buy.”

— Isabel Allende

496. “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

497. “Superego is not the same as consciousness; the former punishes us and the latter guides us. I stopped listening to the overseer inside me who demands compliance and performance with the voice of my grandfather. The race uphill is over; now I stroll calmly in the land of intuition, which has turned out to be the best environment for writing.”

— Isabel Allende

498. “He had always been thin, but there he was reduced to nothing but skin and bones. His skin was burned by the unrelenting sun, salt, and sand, his features sharpened: he was a Giacometti sculpture in cast iron.”

— Isabel Allende

499. “To see my country with the heart, one must read Pablo Neruda, the national poet who in his verses immortalized the imposing landscapes, the aromas and dawns, the tenacious rain and dignified poverty, the stoicism and the hospitality, of Chile. That is the land of my nostalgia, the one I invoke in my solitude, the one that appears as a backdrop in so many of my stories, the one that comes to me in my dreams.”

— Isabel Allende

500. “The man and the little girl looked at each other, recognizing themselves in the other’s eyes.”

— Isabel Allende