Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Buenos Aires, sophisticated and fascinating, is the Paris of Latin America; with a vibrant cultural scene, the best theater and live music, it is the birthplace of many world-famous writers.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

156. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

159. “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

160. “In that respect women are really thick. They’re the daughters of rigidity. They need a man to feel secure but they don’t realize that the one thing they should be afraid of is men. They don’t know how to run their lives. They have to sacrifice themselves for the sake of someone else.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

162. “Hundreds of thousands of terrified refugees were escaping to France, where a campaign of fear and hatred awaited them.”

— Isabel Allende

163. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

173. “Cooking can be like foreplay.”

— Isabel Allende

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

194. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

196. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

198. “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

199. “Souls in pain know no borders.”

— Isabel Allende

200. “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