Isabel Allende Quotes
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151. “How accommodating love is; it forgives everything.”

— Isabel Allende

152. “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

153. “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

154. “Cooking can be like foreplay.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

166. “Souls in pain know no borders.”

— Isabel Allende

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

175. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

178. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

181. “On that long journey she wept all the tears stored in her soul, leaving none in reserve for later sorrows.”

— Isabel Allende

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “In terrible moments, in moments of revolution, of war or repression, of illness or death, people react with incredible strength.”

— Isabel Allende

186. “When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader’s heart.”

— Isabel Allende

187. “Feminism, like the ocean, is fluid, powerful, deep, and encompasses the infinite complexity of life; it moves in waves, currents, tides, and sometimes in storms. Like the ocean, feminism never stays quiet.”

— Isabel Allende

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

191. “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

192. “At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.”

— Isabel Allende

193. “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

194. “Intimacy needs time to mature – a shared history, tears shed, obstacles overcome, photographs in an album. It’s a slow-growing plant.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

197. “Happiness is pure kitch; we come into the world to suffer and learn.”

— Isabel Allende

198. “I need to remember to overcome.”

— Isabel Allende

199. “It was then that 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

200. “Dicen que las mujeres muy bellas son inolvidables, espero que aprendas a vivir sin ella, aunque no la olvides.”

— Isabel Allende