Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “People are afraid of falling in love because they don’t want to suffer.”

— Isabel Allende

252. “I need to tell a story. It’s an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later.”

— Isabel Allende

253. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

256. “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

257. “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

258. “He hoped that none of his descendants would get mixed up in politics, which was a trade for butchers and bandits.”

— Isabel Allende

259. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

261. “She tried to understand what it meant to carry winter on your back, to hesitate over every step, to confuse words you don’t hear properly, to have the impression that the rest of the world is going about in a great rush; the emptiness, frailty, fatigue, and indifference toward everything not directly related to you, even children and grandchildren, whose absence was not felt as it once had been, and whose names you had to struggle to remember.”

— Isabel Allende

262. “El espectro de la pobreza, como el de la soledad, rondaba siempre a los viejos.”

— Isabel Allende

263. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

266. “The lack of a father leaves a hole in a woman’s heart, Lucia. A girl needs to feel she is protected; she needs masculine energy to develop trust in men and later to be able to give herself in love.”

— Isabel Allende

267. “Time moves so slowly. Or perhaps it doesn’t move at all and it is we who pass through it.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

269. “Her stoic attitude contributed to the air of mystery surrounding her, long before she had any secrets to keep.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

271. “Her body was growing old, but inside she still kept intact the adolescent she once was.”

— Isabel Allende

272. “Writing is like riding a bicycle: you don’t forget how, even if you go for years without doing it.”

— Isabel Allende

273. “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

274. “Remember that all the others are more afraid than you.”

— Isabel Allende

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “We’re not old because we are seventy. We start to grow old as soon as we are born, we change every day, life is a continuous state of flux. We evolve. The only difference is that now we are a little closer to death. What’s so bad about that? Love and friendship do not age.”

— Isabel Allende

279. “It was an election year and there was reason for concern over the turn of events. The country was waking up. The wave of discontent that was stirring the people was beginning to strike at the heart of that oligarchic society.”

— Isabel Allende

280. “People do not belong to others, either. How can the huincas buy and sell people if they do not own them. Sometimes the boy went two or three days without speaking a word, surly, and not eating, and when asked what was the matter, the answer was always the same: “There are content days and there are sad days. Each person is a master of his silence.”

— Isabel Allende

281. “Si una mujer ofrece la mejilla para que su novio no la bese en la boca, hasta un ciego puede ver que ya no siente amor.”

— Isabel Allende

282. “I am frightened. I have known fear before, but there was always an escape; even during the terror of the military coup there was the salvation of exile. Now I am in a blind alley with all doors closed to hope, and I don’t know how to handle so much fear.”

— Isabel Allende

283. “The simple recipe for success that Mendel had instilled in his children from the cradle on consisted in never complaining, never asking for anything, striving to be the best in everything you do, and never trusting anyone. Alma had to carry this heavy weight on her back for several decades, until love helped her shed some of it. Her stoic attitude contributed to the air of mystery surrounding her, long before she had any secrets to keep.”

— Isabel Allende

284. “How exuberant and boisterous the universe is, Alma! It turns and turns, and the only constant is everything changes. It is a mystery we can only appreciate out of stillness. I’m living through a very interesting stage. My spirit contemplates the changes in my body with fascination, but this contemplation is not from a distance, but from within. My spirit and my body are together in this process.”

— Isabel Allende

285. “This is what women want: to be safe, to be valued, to live in peace, to have their own resources, to be connected, to have control over their bodies and lives, and above all, to be loved.”

— Isabel Allende

286. “Ja verujem da se naporan rad uvek nagradjuje.”

— Isabel Allende

287. “Agosins poetic language engages the reader in a mesmerizing journey of inward reflection and exile.”

— Isabel Allende

288. “Although stunned and hungry, many sang, because it would have been pointless to aggravate misfortune by complaining.”

— Isabel Allende

289. “Childhood is a naturally unhappy period of our existence, Lillian. It was Walt Disney who invented the notion that it has to be happy, simply to make money.”

— Isabel Allende

290. “In the Chinese language, do you know what the characters for ‘crisis’ are? ‘Danger’ plus ’opportunity.”

— Isabel Allende

291. “I don’t think of literature as an end in itself. It’s just a way of communicating something.”

— Isabel Allende

292. “She treated him with the casual kindness usually reserved for other people’s pets.”

— Isabel Allende

293. “I should say that I’m not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres.”

— Isabel Allende

294. “The Germans are not a race of psychopaths, Alma. They’re normal people like you and me, but with fanaticism, power, and impunity, anyone can turn into a monster, like the SS at Auschwitz,” he told his sister.”

— Isabel Allende

295. “Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentacostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy.”

— Isabel Allende

296. “I feel that my life and therefore my writing accept the possibility of all the mystery. Everything we don’t know; everything that can possibly happen.”

— Isabel Allende

297. “The last time I was in Chile, I was hypnotized by a friend who is studying to be a curandero, a healer, who led me back through several incarnations. It wasn’t easy to return to the present, however, since my friend hadn’t reached that part of the course, but the experiment was well worth the effort because I discovered that in former lives I was not Genghis Khan, as my mother believes.”

— Isabel Allende

298. “I stroke them, and they always like that, because old people don’t have anyone who touches them, and I get them hooked on a TV series, because nobody wants to die before the final episode. Some of them find comfort in prayer, but there are lots of atheists here, and they don’t pray. What’s most important is not to leave them on their own.”

— Isabel Allende

299. “The property adjoined the bay, and when the tide came in it was possible to go kayaking, which some of the residents not yet disabled by their infirmities were happy to do. This is how I would like to live, thought Irina, taking deep breaths of the sweet aroma of pines and laurels.”

— Isabel Allende

300. “His house of cards had collapsed, and he lay among the ruins – but he was free. He felt euphoric, weightless, years younger. The only thing he missed was Indiana, but she too belonged to the past; she too had been carried off by the wind.”

— Isabel Allende