Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Barrabas came to us by the sea.”

— Isabel Allende

102. “I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences.”

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

— Isabel Allende

106. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

108. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

110. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

118. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

120. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

130. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

140. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

142. “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

143. “We all have demons in the dark recesses of our soul, but if we bring them out into the light, they grow smaller and weaker, they fall silent and eventually leave us in peace.”

— Isabel Allende

144. “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

145. “Nothing can grow in the shade of secrets, she would say, love needs light and space to flourish.”

— Isabel Allende

146. “If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving...”

— Isabel Allende

147. “With women the best aphrodisiac is words.”

— Isabel Allende

148. “Give, give, give-what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don’t give it away?”

— Isabel Allende

149. “El aire fresco y el trabajo duro son remedios infalibles contra la estupidez del amor.”

— Isabel Allende

150. “Happiness is not exuberant or noisy, like pleasure or joy; it’s silent, tranquil, and gentle; it’s a feeling of satisfaction inside that begins with self-love.”

— Isabel Allende