Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Fourth of July picnic. And by the way, that picnic, like everything else in this land, is a model of efficiency: you drive at top speed, set up in a previously reserved space, spread out the baskets, bolt your food, kick the ball, and rush home to avoid the traffic. In Chile, a similar project would take three days.”

— Isabel Allende

353. “I was terrified of being dependent too, Alma,” Dr. Catherine Hope told her one day. “But I’ve realized it’s not such a big deal. You get used to it, and are grateful for the assistance. I can’t dress or take a shower on my own, I have problems brushing my teeth and cutting the chicken on my plate, but I’ve never been more contented than I am now.”

— Isabel Allende

354. “The poet thought this was a splendid riposte, and so accepted him on board, together with fishermen, farm and factory workers, manual laborers, and intellectuals as well, despite instructions from his government to avoid anyone with ideas.”

— Isabel Allende

355. “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. “Do you think that, given the opportunity, you’d also behave like a monster, Samuel?” “I don’t think it, Alma, I know it. I’ve been a soldier all my life. I’ve been to war. I’ve interrogated prisoners, a large number of them. But I assume you don’t want details.”

— Isabel Allende

356. “She was one of those stoical, practical women of our country, the kind of woman who has a child with every man who passes through her life and, on top of that, takes in other people’s abandoned children, her own poor relatives, and anybody else who needs a mother, a sister, or an aunt; the kind of woman who’s the pillar of many other lives, who raises her children to grow up and leave her and lets her men leave too, without a word of reproach, because she has more pressing things to worry about.”

— Isabel Allende

357. “Writing is a long process of introspection; it is a voyage toward the darkest caverns of consciousness, a long, slow meditation. I write feeling my way in silence, and along the way discover particles of truth, small crystals that fit in the palm of one hand and justify my passage through this world.”

— Isabel Allende

358. “But I don’t want more things than I need, either.”

— Isabel Allende

359. “Si eres brillante de joven, no significa que de adulto sirvas para algo.”

— Isabel Allende

360. “Very few old folk are happy, Irina. Most of them are poor, aren’t healthy, and have no family. It’s the most fragile and difficult stage of life, more so than childhood, because it grows worse day by day, and there is no future other than death.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

362. “The rural women taught me that courage is contagious and that there’s strength in numbers; what you can’t do on your own can be achieved together, the more the better.”

— Isabel Allende

363. “Compared to Europe, Chile was a happily backward and distant paradise. It was true that at this moment it had a center-left government: the president was from the Radical Party and a freemason. He was detested by the Right, and his name was never mentioned by the “best families,” but he wasn’t going to last long. The Left, with its coarse realism and vulgarity, had no future; the owners of Chile would make sure of that.”

— Isabel Allende

364. “He was so unfamiliar with this peaceful sense of happiness he did not even recognize it.”

— Isabel Allende

365. “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

366. “You are going to be judged harshly because success in women is not easily forgiven.”

— Isabel Allende

367. “At the age of twenty-two, suspecting their time was limited, Ichimei and she had gorged on love to enjoy it to the full, but the more they tried to exhaust it, the wilder their desire became, and whoever says that every flame must sooner or later be extinguished is wrong, because there are passions that blaze on until destiny destroys them with a swipe of its paw, and even then hot embers remain that need only a breath of oxygen to be rekindled.”

— Isabel Allende

368. “We have to consider violence against women for what it really is: the greatest crisis that faces humanity.”

— Isabel Allende

369. “He did not know that she had seen her own destiny, that she had summoned him with the power of her thought, and that she had already made up her mind to marry without love.”

— Isabel Allende

370. “Van ons hangt het af of liefde eeuwig is.”

— Isabel Allende

371. “The reality is that everyone is responsible for their own life. We’re dealt certain cards at birth, and we play our hand; some of us lose, but others may play skillfully from the same bad hand and triumph. Our cards determine who we are: age, gender, race, family, nationality, etc., and we can’t change them, only play them to the best of our abilities. The game is marked by challenges and chances, strategizing and cheating.”

— Isabel Allende

372. “Lo peor es tenerle miedo al miedo.”

— Isabel Allende

373. “I discovered that social climbing was a middle-class phenomenon, the poor never gave it a thought, they were too busy trying to survive. Over the years these communities acquired political savvy, they organized and became fertile territory for leftist parties. Ten years later, in 1970, they were decisive in electing Salvador Allende and for that reason had to suffer the greatest repression during the dictatorship.”

— Isabel Allende

374. “She embellished the facts because she was aware that life is how we tell it, so why would she jot down trivia?”

— Isabel Allende

375. “The upper middle class and the economic right, who had favored the coup, were euphoric. At first they were a little shocked when they saw the consequences of their action; they had never lived in a dictatorship and did not know what it was like. They thought the loss of democratic freedoms would be temporary and that it was possible to go without individual or collective rights for a while so long as the regime respected the tenets of free enterprise.”

— Isabel Allende

376. “Someone like him who thought more about himself than he did his community, had no place in the tribe. Individualism was thought to be a form of madness, like being possessed by a demon.”

— Isabel Allende

377. “Se requiere una voluntad heroica para mantener todo en su sitio.”

— Isabel Allende

378. “Uncle Bruno and I celebrated the miracle of life with every chick that hatched from its egg and every tomato that came from the garden to the table; he taught me to observe and listen attentively, to get my bearings in the woods, to swim in freezing lakes and rivers, to start a fire without a match, to enjoy the pleasure of sinking my face into a juicy watermelon, and to accept the inevitable pain of saying goodbye to people and animals, because there is no life without death, as he always said.”

— Isabel Allende

379. “There was no defense against the shells, he said, but they had calculated that three volumes of philosophy could stop bullets.”

— Isabel Allende

380. “What’s at the root of this explosive mixture of desire for and hatred of women? Why are aggression and harassment not civil rights or human rights concerns? Why are women silenced? Why isn’t there a declared war against such violence, like the war against drugs, terrorism, or crime? The answer is obvious: Violence and fear are instruments of control.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

382. “I was so drained I felt as if I were staring through a telescope at the light of a star dead for a million years.”

— Isabel Allende

383. “Esto sirve para tranquilizarnos la conciencia, hija. Pero no ayuda a los pobres. No necesitan caridad, sino justicia.”

— Isabel Allende

384. “Dobbiamo rimettere tutto in discussione, dalla religione alle leggi, dalla scienza agli usi e costumi.”

— Isabel Allende

385. “After the Spanish Civil War, refugees came to Chile escaping the defeat. In 1939, the poet Pablo Neruda, at the direction of the Chilean government, chartered a ship, the Winnipeg, which sailed from Marseilles carrying a cargo of intellectuals, writers, artists, physicians, engineers, and fine craftsmen.”

— Isabel Allende

386. “AND SINCE we’re talking about nostalgia, I beg you to have a little patience with what follows because I can’t separate the subject of Chile from my own life. My past is composed of passions, surprises, successes, and losses: it isn’t easy to relate in two or three sentences.”

— Isabel Allende

387. “The reality is that everyone is responsible for their own life. We’re dealt certain cards at birth, and we play our hand; some of us lose, but others may play skillfully from the same bad hand and triumph.”

— Isabel Allende

388. “El primer amor es como la viruela, deja huellas imborrables.”

— Isabel Allende

389. “In my family, happiness was irrelevant.”

— Isabel Allende

390. “You say you’re a coward, but it takes courage to say good-bye to everything and cross a threshold without any idea where it leads.”

— Isabel Allende

391. “Respect, compliance, and fear, which are instilled in women from infancy, are so detrimental to us that we don’t even know our own power. So great is that power, the patriarchy’s goal is to crush it by any means, including the worst forms of violence. These methods are so successful that frequently the most rabid defenders of the patriarchy are women.”

— Isabel Allende

392. “In Chile it is bad manners to acknowledge that you’re overly satisfied, because that can irritate the less fortunate, which is why for us the correct answer to the question “How are you?” is “So-so.” That is an opening for sympathizing with the other speaker’s situation.”

— Isabel Allende

393. “La gente no lee lo que no le interesa y si le interesa es que ya tiene madurez para hacerlo.”

— Isabel Allende

394. “In her mother’s last days, Lucia understood that death was not an end, was not the absence of life, but a powerful oceanic wave of clear, luminous water that was carrying her off to another dimension.”

— Isabel Allende

395. “Dios no nos manda sufrimientos sin la fortaleza para soportarlos.”

— Isabel Allende

396. “She was one of those people who are born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengeance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism, but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation...”

— Isabel Allende

397. “The spotless order of barracks and the artificial peace of fear reigned everywhere.”

— Isabel Allende

398. “I related my impressions of La Paz, its purple mountains, its hermetic Indians, and its air, so thin that your lungs are always on the verge of filling with foam and your mind with hallucinations.”

— Isabel Allende

399. “It’s hard to make money working; and the harder the work, the worse the pay. It takes effort not to lose everything and end up on the street. It’s easy, on the other hand, to get rich without producing anything, moving money from one place to another, speculating, taking advantage of stock opportunities, investing in the hard work of others.”

— Isabel Allende

400. “No, literature was definitely not a reasonable career path in a country like Chile where intellectual scorn for women was absolute.”

— Isabel Allende