Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

456. “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

457. “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

458. “I never accepted the limited feminine role imposed upon me by my family, society, culture, and religion. At fifteen I walked away from the church forever, not for lack of faith – that cam later – but because of the inherent machismo of all religious organizations. I cannot belong to an institution that considers me a second-class member whose authorities, always male, enjoy complete impunity and enforce their rules with dogma.”

— Isabel Allende

459. “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

460. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “Mi vida se hace al contarla y mi memoria se fija con la escritura;.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

468. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

470. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

476. “That is s-s-s-something.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

478. “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

479. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

481. “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

482. “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

483. “Gervasio Lonquimay.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

486. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

488. “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

489. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

491. “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

492. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

494. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

496. “Suggestion works miracles.”

— Isabel Allende

497. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende