Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

256. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

266. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “He had the awkward tenderness of someone who has never been loved and is forced to improvise.”

— Isabel Allende

273. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

278. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

281. “Las miserias de la enfermedad nos igualan, no hay ricos ni pobres, al cruzar este umbral los privilegios se hacen humo y nos volvemos humildes. Mi.”

— Isabel Allende

282. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

285. “No se puede encontrar a quien no quiere ser encontrado.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

289. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

292. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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