Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

204. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

210. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

212. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

216. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

228. “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

229. “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

230. “I need to remember to overcome.”

— Isabel Allende

231. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

233. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

235. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

240. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

243. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

250. “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