Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The writer of good will carries a lamp to illuminate the dark corners.”

— Isabel Allende

102. “Barrabas came to us by the sea.”

— Isabel Allende

103. “Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.”

— Isabel Allende

104. “The two moments are much alike: birth and death are made of the same fabric.”

— Isabel Allende

105. “A novel is like a window, open to an infinite landscape.”

— Isabel Allende

106. “Fiction happens in the womb. It doesn’t get processed in the mind until you do the editing.”

— Isabel Allende

107. “I’m living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.”

— Isabel Allende

108. “No me preguntes lo que no quieres que te conteste.”

— Isabel Allende

109. “His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference.”

— Isabel Allende

110. “She believed that by giving problems a name they tended to manifest themselves, and then it was impossible to ignore them; whereas if they remained in the limbo of unspoken words, they could disappear by themselves, with the passage of time.”

— Isabel Allende

111. “I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously... That’s why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension.”

— Isabel Allende

112. “I’ve been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don’t have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That’s why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?”

— Isabel Allende

113. “Dying is not easy. It’s a very hard transition.”

— Isabel Allende

114. “Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.”

— Isabel Allende

115. “The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn’t find a place for myself, for years and years.”

— Isabel Allende

116. “I don’t think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.”

— Isabel Allende

117. “I like Hillary Clinton a lot. I know her.”

— Isabel Allende

118. “Todos tenemos una reserva de fuerza interior insospechada, que surge cuando la vida nos pone a prueba.”

— Isabel Allende

119. “Why be so attached to what we are bound to lose anyway?”

— Isabel Allende

120. “La realidad es que cada uno es responsable de su propia vida. Nacemos con ciertas cartas del naipe, y con ellas jugamos nuestro juego; a algunos les tocan malas cartas y lo pierden todo, pero otros juegan magistralmente con esas mismas cartas y triunfan.”

— Isabel Allende

121. “I should say that I’m not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres.”

— Isabel Allende

122. “It is common knowledge that no man that women flock to boasts of his conquests. Those who do, lie.”

— Isabel Allende

123. “Pan, circo y algo que venerar, es todo lo que necesitan.”

— Isabel Allende

124. “John Lennon said that life is what happens when we are busy making other plans.”

— Isabel Allende

125. “A cada uno le llega el momento de alcanzar su nivel de incompetencia.”

— Isabel Allende

126. “Dobbiamo rimettere tutto in discussione, dalla religione alle leggi, dalla scienza agli usi e costumi.”

— Isabel Allende

127. “The journey of life has long and tedious stretches, step by step, day by day, without anything exciting happening, but memory is made up of the unexpected events that mark your course.”

— Isabel Allende

128. “I was a romantic and sentimental creature, with a tendency towards solitude.”

— Isabel Allende

129. “I am happier when I love than when I am loved. I adore my husband, my son, my grandchildren, my mother, my dog, and frankly, I don’t know if they even like me. But who cares? Loving them is my joy.”

— Isabel Allende

130. “We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.”

— Isabel Allende

131. “I had a very rough childhood and not a happy one and by age 15 I was an old person in many ways. I knew that I had to take care of myself, I um and I always did.”

— Isabel Allende

132. “Un hombre hace lo que puede, una mujer hace lo que el hombre no puede.”

— Isabel Allende

133. “My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left.”

— Isabel Allende

134. “We want a world where life is preserved, and the quality of life is enriched for everybody, not only for the privileged.”

— Isabel Allende

135. “Land is something one should never sell. It is the only thing left when all else is gone.”

— Isabel Allende

136. “I’m open to love, and I think that I will fall in love with a wonderful man.”

— Isabel Allende

137. “Society decides when we get old. But the spirit never ages.”

— Isabel Allende

138. “I think that my life changed at 50. Many things happened. Menopause, the end of youth and my daughter died that year after being a whole year in a coma. So I think that I changed and I became an elder at 50.”

— Isabel Allende

139. “Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent.”

— Isabel Allende

140. “Since when has a man not beaten his wife? If he doesn’t beat her, it’s either because he doesn’t love her or because he isn’t a real man. Since when is a man’s paycheck or the fruit of the earth or what the chickens lay shared between them, when everybody knows he is the one in charge? Since when has a woman ever done the same things as a man? Besides, she was born with a wound between her legs and without balls, right, Senora Clara?”

— Isabel Allende

141. “The first two, three, four weeks are wasted. I just show up in front of the computer. Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too. If she doesn’t show up invited, eventually she just shows up.”

— Isabel Allende

142. “That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities.”

— Isabel Allende

143. “The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.”

— Isabel Allende

144. “Only that, nothing more – a tiny beam of light to show some hidden aspect of reality, to help decipher and understand it and thus to initiate, if possible, a change in the conscience of some readers.”

— Isabel Allende

145. “No existe luz sin sombra, tal como no existe dicha sin dolor.”

— Isabel Allende

146. “Someone has said that conversation is sex for the soul.”

— Isabel Allende

147. “My father says that fear is good; it’s the body’s alarm system, it warns us of danger. But sometimes danger can’t be avoided, and then you have to forget about being afraid.”

— Isabel Allende

148. “Real soup is to the body what peace is to the soul.”

— Isabel Allende

149. “Memory is fragile and capricious; each of us remembers and forgets according to what is convenient. The past is a notebook with many leaves on which we jot down our lives with ink that changes according to our state of mind.”

— Isabel Allende

150. “Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.”

— Isabel Allende