Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I have been a woman for 46 years and I only recently realized I can’t change it and I like it.”

— Isabel Allende

202. “We have to defend democracy, but remember that not everything is politics. Without science, industry, and technology, no progress is possible, and without music and art, there’s no soul.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

206. “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

207. “I write to understand my circumstances, to sort out the confusion of reality, to exorcise my demons. But most of all, I write because I love it!”

— Isabel Allende

208. “Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span...”

— Isabel Allende

209. “The connection that I have with my readers makes me very happy, and gives meaning to the strange profession of writing.”

— Isabel Allende

210. “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

211. “The girl you were died; the potion of death was what all of us women swallow sooner or later. Have you noticed how at puberty the Amazon-like energy we are born with fades and we turn into doubt-filled creatures with clipped wings? The woman left trapped in the silo is also you, a prisoner of the restrictions of adult life. The female condition is a disgrace, Isabel, it’s like having rocks tied to your ankles so you can’t fly.”

— Isabel Allende

212. “We have often said that loving each other is our destiny, that we have loved each other in past lives and will go on meeting in lives to come. Or it may be there is no past or future, and everything takes place simultaneously in the universe’s infinite dimensions. If that is so, we remain together forever. It’s fantastic to be alive. We are still seventeen years old, my Alma.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

214. “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

215. “I need to remember to overcome.”

— Isabel Allende

216. “Literary characters, like my grandmother’s apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages.”

— Isabel Allende

217. “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

218. “I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans.”

— Isabel Allende

219. “A muchas hijas nos ha tocado vivir la vida que nuestras madres no pudieron vivir.”

— Isabel Allende

220. “Writing is a constant exercise in longing.”

— Isabel Allende

221. “Because he had hardened his soul and silenced his conscience with the excuse of progress.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

223. “The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.”

— Isabel Allende

224. “Their longstanding friendship turned into a deeper complicity in which there was no room for secrets, suspicion, or offense; they started from the principle that they would never hurt each other and that if this happened, it would be unintentional. They protected each other, which made their present hardships and the ghosts of the past bearable.”

— Isabel Allende

225. “I’m so old that I don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

227. “More and more books are published every year. If people were not reading them, they wouldn’t be published. We are now reading electronic books or whatever else, but people are still reading, and people still need stories.”

— Isabel Allende

228. “La vejez es el mejor momento para ser y hacer lo que a uno le place.”

— Isabel Allende

229. “I’m fine here, Lenny. I’m discovering who I am without all my ornaments and accessories. It’s quite a slow process, but a very useful one. Everybody ought to do the same at the end of their life. If I had any self-discipline I would beat my grandson to it and write my own memoirs. I have time, freedom, and silence, the three things I never had amidst all the noise of my earlier life. I’m preparing to die.” “That won’t.”

— Isabel Allende

230. “Since we’re going to suffer, let’s clench our teeth,” she said. Pain like that, pain of the soul, does not go away with remedies, therapy, or vacations; you simply endure it deep down, fully, as you should. I would have done well to follow my Nini’s example, instead of denying that I was suffering and stifling the howl that was stuck in my chest.”

— Isabel Allende

231. “Because I have time to spare, and for the first time in my life nobody expects anything of me. I don’t have to prove anything, I’m not rushing everywhere; each day is a gift I enjoy to the fullest.”

— Isabel Allende

232. “The success occurs in a place outside of me, and doesn’t touch me on an intimate level. I live in my own skin, I have not changed greatly, I remain the same woman.”

— Isabel Allende

233. “Clara lived in a universe of her own invention, protected from life’s inclement weather, where the prosaic truth of material objects mingled with the tumultuous reality of dreams and the laws of physics and logic did not always apply.”

— Isabel Allende

234. “There is room in the human heart for all the divinities.”

— Isabel Allende

235. “My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else’s.”

— Isabel Allende

236. “At my age, people prefer to stay in a relationship that is not working. I do not understand that. I think it takes a lot of courage to separate. But it takes more energy to stay in something that is not working.”

— Isabel Allende

237. “Maybe the war against this cancer is lost, but meanwhile we can win a few battles.”

— Isabel Allende

238. “An invisible border arose between the parts of the house occupied by Esteban Trueba and those occupied by his wife. In response to Clara’s imagination and the requirements of the moment, the noble, seigniorial architecture began sprouting all sorts of extra little rooms, staircases, turrets, and terraces... the big house on the corner soon came to resemble a labyrinth.”

— Isabel Allende

239. “Walking and walking across the world he will gradually find consolation, and one day, when he is too fatigued to take another step, he will realize that he cannot escape sorrow, he will have to tame it, so it doesn’t harass him.”

— Isabel Allende

240. “I realized that she had simply fulfilled her mission in this life and that she had escaped another dimension where her spirit, finally free of its material burden, would be more at home.”

— Isabel Allende

241. “There’s a certain freshness and innocence in people who have always lived in one place and can count on witnesses to their passage through the world. In contrast, those of us who have moved on many times develop tough skin out of necessity. Since we lack roots or corroboration of who we are, we must put our trust in memory to give continuity to our lives... but memory is always cloudy, we can’t trust it.”

— Isabel Allende

242. “They could not understand the advantage of living contrary to their inclinations in this world in order to enjoy a hypothetical well-being in another.”

— Isabel Allende

243. “And that fox escaped with his tail between his legs, with all of the hens chasing after him.”

— Isabel Allende

244. “The elderly are the most entertaining people in the world,” she eventually told Irina. “They have lived a lot, say whatever they like, and couldn’t care less about other people’s opinion. You’ll never get bored here. Our residents are well educated, and if they’re in good health they keep on learning and experimenting. This community stimulates them and they can avoid the worst scourge of old age: loneliness.” Irina.”

— Isabel Allende

245. “Estas largas separaciones son peligrosas, el amor resbala por arenas inciertas.”

— Isabel Allende

246. “There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It’s the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that’s why they get noticed.”

— Isabel Allende

247. “Without science, industry, and technology, no progress is possible, and without music and art, there’s no soul,” he would maintain.”

— Isabel Allende

248. “The most poor and backward areas in the world are those in which women are subjugated and exploited. Improving the situation of the woman improves the family, the community, and by extension the whole country.”

— Isabel Allende

249. “I especially like your autumn trees, gracefully letting their leaves fall. That is how I would like to shed my own leaves in this autumn of life, easily and elegantly. Why be so attached to what we are bound to lose anyway? I suppose I mean youth, which has been so present in our conversations.”

— Isabel Allende

250. “Mothers, on the other hand, are trees with firm roots.”

— Isabel Allende