Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.”

— Isabel Allende

152. “Be careful what you ask of Heaven; it might be granted.”

— Isabel Allende

153. “Wishes and fears are illusions, Dil Bahadur, not realities. You must practice detachment.”

— Isabel Allende

154. “La nostalgia desgasta y aniquila, es el vicio de los desterrados.”

— Isabel Allende

155. “Affection is like the noonday sun; it does not need the presence of another to be manifest.”

— Isabel Allende

156. “How accommodating love is; it forgives everything.”

— Isabel Allende

157. “You only have one life, but if you live it well, that’s enough. The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy?”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

159. “How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don’t have a voice to speak?”

— Isabel Allende

160. “At my age days dissolve like salt in water; the day’s gone and I don’t even know what I’ve done with the hours.”

— Isabel Allende

161. “I don’t want posterity, I don’t want anybody to remember me in any way. I don’t care about that because I’ll be dead. I think the spirit will move to some other state.”

— Isabel Allende

162. “Color prejudice is so strong that if a woman has yellow hair, even if she has the face of an iguana, men turn to look at her in the street.”

— Isabel Allende

163. “Cooking can be like foreplay.”

— Isabel Allende

164. “I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist – although the term had not reached Chile yet, so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me.”

— Isabel Allende

165. “I would like to be with my husband together sitting somewhere in a lonely place in the woods and take something, maybe some pills or something, a magic potion and die together.”

— Isabel Allende

166. “The only cure for so much misfortune is love. It’s not the force of gravity that keeps the universe in balance, but the binding power of love.”

— Isabel Allende

167. “Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally.”

— Isabel Allende

168. “We are all born happy. Life gets us dirty along the way, but we can clean it up. 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. You need to love yourself as I do, as all those who know you do, especially Alma’s grandson.”

— Isabel Allende

169. “I felt the strength of his desire, his hands at my waist, at the back of my neck, in my hair, his lips on my face and neck; I caught his young man’s scent, heard his voice murmuring my name, and I felt blessed. How could I in less than a minute go from the sadness of having been abandoned to the joy of feeling loved?”

— Isabel Allende

170. “What’s the worst thing about growing old?” she would ask them. They never thought about their age, was a common reply; they had once been adolescents, then they were thirty, fifty, sixty, and never gave it a thought, so why should they do so now?”

— Isabel Allende

171. “Love is a free contract that begins with a spark and can end the same way.”

— Isabel Allende

172. “She intended to swallow the world and he lived crushed by reality.”

— Isabel Allende

173. “Igual que en el momento de venir al mundo, al morir tenemos miedo de lo desconocido. Pero el miedo es algo interior que no tiene nada que ver con la realidad.”

— Isabel Allende

174. “Heart is what drives us and determines our fate.”

— Isabel Allende

175. “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

176. “Supongo que en el transcurso de la vida embellecemos algunos recuerdos y procuramos olvidar otros.”

— Isabel Allende

177. “She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh.”

— Isabel Allende

178. “The point was not to die, since death came anyway, but to survive, which would be a miracle.”

— Isabel Allende

179. “I’m surrounded by the scene of aging. I myself am in my 70s and not getting any younger. Although I’m very healthy, and I have a lot of energy, and I still feel 50, I’m over 70 and I understand that I am preparing for later.”

— Isabel Allende

180. “She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother’s sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.”

— Isabel Allende

181. “I’m such a control freak. I want to control even my own death. Decide when I will die and how.”

— Isabel Allende

182. “My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.”

— Isabel Allende

183. “All you will have is the present. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.”

— Isabel Allende

184. “Mi vida se hace al contarla y mi memoria se fija con la escritura; lo que no pongo en palabras sobre papel, lo borra el tiempo.”

— Isabel Allende

185. “Life is long, and the world is large. It is all a question of taking a chance.”

— Isabel Allende

186. “Going around in a sulk will get you nowhere. Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional.”

— Isabel Allende

187. “Por un tiempo se extraviaron en una intimidad absoluta que confundieron con el amor.”

— Isabel Allende

188. “A veces, para exorcizar los demonios de un recuerdo es necesario contarlo como un cuento.”

— Isabel Allende

189. “Women are the only ones who will be able to eliminate the patriarchy, and when that happens all of us will win, men as much as women.”

— Isabel Allende

190. “Souls in pain know no borders.”

— Isabel Allende

191. “As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing?”

— Isabel Allende

192. “The wise man desires nothing; he does not judge, he makes no plans, he keeps his mind open and his.”

— Isabel Allende

193. “The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing.”

— Isabel Allende

194. “Eso pasa con la edad: las historias del pasado cobran vida y se nos pegan en la piel.”

— Isabel Allende

195. “In my book tours I get to meet an audience every night. And I see that there are mostly young people, and there are a lot of more men than before, but always young, I don’t get older men. As I’m getting older, my audience gets younger!”

— Isabel Allende

196. “He understood then that all his exploits as a reporter, the feats that had won him such recognition and fame, were merely an attempt to keep his most ancient fears at bay, a stratagem for taking refuge behind a lens to test whether reality was more tolerable from that perspective.”

— Isabel Allende

197. “When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it’s full of mistakes and repetitions. It’s good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It’s not a lecture.”

— Isabel Allende

198. “I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.”

— Isabel Allende

199. “Just as Daniel Balalcazar said, it makes no sense to suffer in advance a misfortune that may never occur.”

— Isabel Allende

200. “I have been a woman for 46 years and I only recently realized I can’t change it and I like it.”

— Isabel Allende