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

— Isabel Allende

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “I try to let go of the intellect and just tell the story. I only read the page I have in front of me on the screen. Then when the whole story is told, I print it, wait a week and read it.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

263. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

265. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

267. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

277. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

279. “What happens in the world affects me. Sometimes, that’s part of the writing.”

— Isabel Allende

280. “I tried and tried to sleep, lulled by the movement, the purring of the motor, and the snores of the other passengers, but it’s never been easy for me to sleep, and much less now, when I still have residues of the wild life running through my veins.”

— Isabel Allende

281. “I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man’s thought. We should not speak without reason.”

— Isabel Allende

282. “Those native peoples were confounded by the mystery of the crucified man the whites worshipped, and 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

283. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

285. “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

286. “Why be so attached to what we are bound to lose anyway?”

— Isabel Allende

287. “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

288. “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

289. “We always think things like that only happen elsewhere,” said Miguel, “until they happen to us too.”

— Isabel Allende

290. “Word by word I have created the person I am and the invented country in which I live.”

— Isabel Allende

291. “I’m interested in people who have to overcome obstacles, people who are not sheltered by the umbrella of the establishment, marginals.”

— Isabel Allende

292. “The advantage of being lovers is that we have to work hard at our relationship, because everything conspires to drive us apart. Our decision to be together has to be renewed again and again; that keeps us on our toes.”

— Isabel Allende

293. “In the United States, the fact that you can start again gives a lot of energy and strength and youth to this country. That is why it’s so powerful in many ways, and so creative.”

— Isabel Allende

294. “People think that they will sit down and produce the great American novel in one sitting. It doesn’t work that way. This is a very patient and meticulous work, and you have to do it with joy and love for the process, not for the outcome.”

— Isabel Allende

295. “Next to the tree was a short, broad-shouldered Asian man in overalls and a straw hat, leaning on a spade. His face was weathered, and in a halting English difficult to follow, he told Alma that this moment was beautiful, but that it would last only a few days before the blooms fell like rain to the ground; much better was the memory of the cherry tree in bloom, because that would last all year, until the following spring.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

297. “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

298. “I’d realized that in writing happiness is useless-without suffering there is no story.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

300. “The world starts to exist, for Americans, when we are in conflict with a place. And then all of a sudden, Afghanistan pops up on the TV screen and it becomes a place. And it exists for three weeks and then it disappears into thin air.”

— Isabel Allende