Isabel Allende Quotes
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201. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

214. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

216. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

218. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

220. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

223. “No complaining about how hard it is to write, we are all so, so lucky to write, to sit down, inside, and write words on paper. There is no greater freedom, no greater good, nothing that brings more joy.”

— Isabel Allende

224. “Twittering and blogging and all that is fine, but there is no idea of how to phrase something beautifully; how to use language to create an emotion. It’s just passing information and sometimes very superficial information.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

226. “People are afraid of falling in love because they don’t want to suffer.”

— Isabel Allende

227. “In her experience, light skin and money made almost anything easier. She wanted her grandchildren to come into the world with an advantage.”

— Isabel Allende

228. “Heroism is a badly remunerated occupation, and often it leads to an early end, which is why it appeals to fanatics or persons with an unhealthy fascination with death.”

— Isabel Allende

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “She awoke from a long childhood in which she had always been protected and surrounded by attention and comforts, with no responsibilities.”

— Isabel Allende

235. “All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.”

— Isabel Allende

236. “If I didn’t write my soul would dry up and die.”

— Isabel Allende

237. “I was a lousy journalist. I could never be objective. Sometimes I invented the whole story.”

— Isabel Allende

238. “I go, but I always remember you.”

— Isabel Allende

239. “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

240. “Although women do two-thirds of the world’s labor, they own less than one percent of the world’s assets.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

242. “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

243. “Quien se complace en pensar en lo malo, acaba por convocarlo.”

— Isabel Allende

244. “I was alone, without a single cent, in an unknown country. If I’d learned anything from last year’s ill-fated adventures, though, it was not to get overwhelmed by minor inconveniences.”

— Isabel Allende

245. “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

246. “Scrisul e o introspectie indelungata, o calatorie catre grotele cele mai ascunse ale constiintei, o meditatie lenta. Scriu pipaind tacerea, descoperind particule de adevar, mici cristale care-mi cad in palma si-mi justifica trecerea pe aceasta lume.”

— Isabel Allende

247. “When a man’s earning his living doing things he doesn’t like, he feels like a slave; when he’s doing what he loves, he feels like a prince.”

— Isabel Allende

248. “I have travelled all over the world and one thing that amazes me is that I can communicate with people. My story may be different but emotionally we are all the same.”

— Isabel Allende

249. “Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende