Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “She treated him with the casual kindness usually reserved for other people’s pets.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

303. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

308. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

335. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

337. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

343. “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

344. “I must not linger on details, daughter, because if we dally, this account may be left unfinished, and no one wants to read hundreds of quartos only to find that the story has no clear ending.”

— Isabel Allende

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

350. “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