Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “We always think things like that only happen elsewhere,” said Miguel, “until they happen to us too.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

303. “I was not supposed to be in any way a liberated person. I was a female born in the ’40s in a patriarchal family; I was supposed to marry and make everyone around me happy.”

— Isabel Allende

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

307. “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

308. “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

309. “I had a serious library at my disposal, because my Popo believed that culture entered by osmosis and it was better to start early, but my favorite books were fairy tales.”

— Isabel Allende

310. “He knew that her body was his to engage in all the acrobatics he had learned in the books he kept hidden in a corner of his library, but with Clara even the most abominable contortions were like the thrashings of a newborn; it was impossible to spice them up with the salt of evil or the pepper of submission.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

312. “My heart is broken, he told himself. It was at that moment he understood the profound meaning of that common phrase: he thought he heard the sound of glass breaking and felt that the essence of his being was pouring out until he was empty, with no memory of the past, no awareness of the present, no hope for the future.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “A public official must understand from his first day in office that any show of initiative will signal the end of his career because he isn’t there to be meritorious but to reach his level of incompetence with dignity.”

— Isabel Allende

318. “He had a booming laugh that bubbled up from the bowels of the earth and shook him from head to toe.”

— Isabel Allende

319. “Mi vida ha sido una serie de navegaciones, he ido de un lado a otro en esta tierra. He sido extranjero sin saber que tenia raices profundas...”

— Isabel Allende

320. “When talking about human rights, in truth we’re referring to men’s rights. If a man is beaten and deprived of his freedom, it’s called torture. When a woman endures the same, it’s called domestic violence and is still considered a private matter in most of the world.”

— Isabel Allende

321. “Writing is my job. I don’t think of it as art.”

— Isabel Allende

322. “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

323. “She accused him of having grandiose ideas and sloppy habits, a fatal combination for a writer.”

— Isabel Allende

324. “I don’t think that we have to look like the models in the magazines because they are 19 year olds and they have been photo shopped extensively, not but given what I, we have as the raw material, take care of it.”

— Isabel Allende

325. “And the truth is that if a writer is successful, you gain readers. It benefits all the writers. It’s important for all the writers that as many of us as possible be successful.”

— Isabel Allende

326. “He had a presentiment that their fates would be intertwined, but immediately rejected it; he always tried to avoid falling into the traps of intuition.”

— Isabel Allende

327. “My books are based on emotions, feelings, relationships. In these areas women are experts, so it’s not strange that the main characters of my novels are females.”

— Isabel Allende

328. “He missed his venerable master, who had marked him forever with a thirst for knowledge as persistent as the drunk’s thirst for alcohol or the ambitious man’s thirst for power. He no longer had his mentor’s library or his inexhaustible fount of experience.”

— Isabel Allende

329. “His wife, Leanne, who came to his waist, looked like an undernourished adolescent with the face of a fly, but her fragility was deceptive: she had given birth to six male children and was expecting the seventh. She knew it would be male because God was determined to test her patience.”

— Isabel Allende

330. “Happiness is slippery, it slithers away between your fingers, but problems are something you can hold on to, they’ve got handles, they’re rough and hard.”

— Isabel Allende

331. “I’ve been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.”

— Isabel Allende

332. “Non parlarmi di domani e di ieri, vivo solamente per questo istante dell’oggi in cui torno a inabissarmi nella notte infinita dei tuoi occhi scuri.”

— Isabel Allende

333. “La realidad es que cada uno es responsable de su propia vida. Nacemos con ciertas cartas del naipe, y con ellas jugamos nuestro juego; a algunos les tocan malas cartas y lo pierden todo, pero otros juegan magistralmente con esas mismas cartas y triunfan.”

— Isabel Allende

334. “If for any reason you don’t like the word feminist, look for another word. The name is not important as long as the work gets done for yourself and for your sisters in the rest of the world who need it.”

— Isabel Allende

335. “I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the ‘message,’ even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.”

— Isabel Allende

336. “Fue lectora voraz desde muy corta edad, con los peligros que esa costumbre conlleva.”

— Isabel Allende

337. “What is the most generous thing to do in this case?”

— Isabel Allende

338. “Writers speak for those who are kept in silence.”

— Isabel Allende

339. “I’m very optimistic because I think that the real strength of a nation like the United States comes from blending cultures. There’s no way that you can close the frontiers anywhere. The borders are there to be violated permanently.”

— Isabel Allende

340. “The author Eduardo Galeano said that “in the end, women’s fear of men’s violence is a reflection of men’s fear of women without fear.”

— Isabel Allende

341. “Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion.”

— Isabel Allende

342. “The deep Chile of the fascists had always been there, beneath the surface, just waiting to emerge. It was the triumph of the arrogant Right, the defeat of the people who believed in that utopian revolution.”

— Isabel Allende

343. “What can we do with this happiness that appears for no obvious reason, the joy that needs no cause to exist?”

— Isabel Allende

344. “Two-thirds of those evacuated at that time had been born in the United States and were American citizens. Standing in long lines, the Japanese had to wait for hours in front of the desks of the officials, who took down their names and handed out labels for them to wear around their necks with their identity number, the same as for their luggage.”

— Isabel Allende

345. “That was the beginning of the revolution. Many years have gone by and blood keeps running, soaking the soil of Haiti, but I am not there to weep.”

— Isabel Allende

346. “If I have a perfect lover waiting for me in California, why would I want an imperfect husband?” I argued. “Lovers don’t last; a husband is a captive prey,” she replied.”

— Isabel Allende

347. “Our land only rewards those who work hard in it.”

— Isabel Allende

348. “It bothers them that instead of taking on the role of abandoned lover, I have become a happy wife. They relish seeing strong women like you and me humiliated. They cannot forgive us that we triumphed where so many others fail... Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is out of balance, in favor of men. That is why they work so hard to mistreat and destroy us.”

— Isabel Allende

349. “How would I run with my bad leg? And what would become of the people who need my care? Besides, it doesn’t mean anything for me to be free and everyone else slaves,” the healer answered. Tete hadn’t thought of that, and it kept buzzing around her brain like a bottlefly. She talked about it with her godmother many times, but she was never able to accept the idea that her freedom was irreparably bound to that of the other slaves.”

— Isabel Allende

350. “I called him Grandfather, because according to him you do not have to be of the same blood or same tribe to be a member of the same family, but in truth I should have called him Maman. He was the only mother I ever knew.”

— Isabel Allende