Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Now that we live longer, we have a couple of decades ahead of us to redefine our goals and find meaning in the years to come. Jampolsky recommends letting go of grievances and negativity. More energy is needed to sustain ill feelings than to forgive. The key to contentment is forgiveness of others and of ourselves. Our last years can be the best if we opt for love instead of fear, he says. Love doesn’t grow like a wild plant, it needs a lot of care.”

— Isabel Allende

402. “There’s a time to live and a time to die. In between there’s time to remember. That is all I’ve done for these past days, silently filling in the missing details to complete this testament – a sentimental legacy, more than a material one.”

— Isabel Allende

403. “La felicidad consiste en alcanzar aquello que hemos esperado por mucho tiempo.”

— Isabel Allende

404. “That fairy tale that all humans are equal before the law and in the eyes of God is a lie, Camilo. I hope you don’t buy into it. Neither the law nor God treats everyone the same.”

— Isabel Allende

405. “During the years he spent in Venezuela he thought he had once and for all overcome the solemnity that had been an essential part of his nature from childhood, as though he was in mourning for all the world’s suffering, violence and evil. Faced with so many disasters, happiness seemed to him obscene. In love with Roser in the green, warm country of Venezuela, he had vanquished the temptation to cloak himself in sadness.”

— Isabel Allende

406. “Since 1973, the year of the military coup that changed so many things, situating has become a little more complex because in the first three minutes of conversation you also have to guess whether the person you’re speaking to was for or against the dictatorship.”

— Isabel Allende

407. “I didn’t get to prepare myself as well as I would’ve liked, and now there’s a lady, who must be death, sitting at the foot of my bed, motioning for me to follow her. I can’t distinguish clearly between night and day, and it doesn’t matter, because pain and memory aren’t measured with clocks. The morphine puts me to sleep and transports me to the dimension of dreams and visions.”

— Isabel Allende

408. “Desde entonces la gente lo recuerda como Juan del Pedo.”

— Isabel Allende

409. “That night, faced with the incontrovertible results, Pinochet, hardened by the arrogance of absolute power and cut off from reality by many years of complete impunity, proposed another coup to keep himself on the presidential throne indefinitely.”

— Isabel Allende

410. “In the past, adulthood arrived at twenty, middle age at forty, and old age at fifty. Today adolescence lasts until past thirty or forty, maturity comes around sixty, and old age starts at eighty. This is the baby boomers’ achievement. Over the last half century they have redefined many cultural aspects for their convenience.”

— Isabel Allende

411. “Neantul este plin de toate lucrurile universului. E neant si, in acelasi timp, e totul. Lumina sacramentala si intuneric nepatruns. Sunt neantul, sunt tot ce este, sunt in fiecare frunza, in fiecare picatura de roua, in fiecare graunte de cenusa purtat de ape, sunt Paula si sunt eu insami, nu sunt nimic si sunt totul, in viata asta si in celelalte, sunt nemuritoare.”

— Isabel Allende

412. “He maintained that magic, like cooking and religion, was a particularly feminine affair...”

— Isabel Allende

413. “En las largas horas de silencio se me atropellan los recuerdos, todo me ha sucedido en el mismo instante, como si mi vida entera fuera una sola imagen ininteligible.”

— Isabel Allende

414. “Privacy is a luxury of the well-to-do because most Chileans have none. Middle-class families and below live in very close quarters, in many homes several people sleep in the same bed. When there is more than one room, the dividing walls are so thin that every sigh comes right through.”

— Isabel Allende

415. “I do not fear my vulnerability because I no longer confuse it with weakness.”

— Isabel Allende

416. “How long does a man spend dying? What does it mean to say “for ever”? Pablo Neruda.”

— Isabel Allende

417. “Con cada amor volvemos a nacer y con cada amor que termina se nos abre una herida. Estoy llena de orgullosas cicatrices.”

— Isabel Allende

418. “My grandfather was an exception among Chileans because no man from the middle class up knows how to decipher a manual, nor does he dirty his hands with motor oil – that’s what maestros are for; they can improvise ingenious solutions with the most modest resources and a minimum of fuss.”

— Isabel Allende

419. “I realized also that in Nahuel, that town of hospitable neighbors, you only had to scratch the surface to uncover the ugliest of vices, though my mentors insisted that cruelty wasn’t inherent to the human condition, merely something born of ignorance and poverty. “It’s much easier to be generous with a full belly than an empty one,” they said. I’ve never believed that, though, because I’ve seen that both kindness and cruelty exist everywhere.”

— Isabel Allende

420. “El problema no estaba en conseguir la respuesta, sino en formular la pregunta precisa.”

— Isabel Allende

421. “Son implacables, predican amor, justicia y caridad, y para imponerlas cometen atrocidades.”

— Isabel Allende

422. “I tried to show my affection and gratitude with small attentions, but he would not allow it; he was not used to receiving affection, although it was his nature to squander it on others.”

— Isabel Allende

423. “He had had his mouth washed out with soap so often that he stopped calling Rosette his sister, but not enough to make him stop loving her with that terrible, possessive, absolute love that solitary children give.”

— Isabel Allende

424. “I am grateful to that unhappy childhood because it provided ample material for my writing. I don’t know how novelists with happy childhoods in normal homes manage.”

— Isabel Allende

425. “The CIA orchestrated a plan to prevent Allende from assuming the presidency. First it tried to bribe members of Congress not to designate Allende and to call for a second vote.”

— Isabel Allende

426. “I said goodbye, kissed her, and asked her forgiveness for the sins of withholding and neglect. I thanked her for having existed, promised her that she would live on in my heart, and in her son’s, begged her not to leave me, to visit me in dreams, to send me signs and clues, to return incarnated in every beautiful young woman I saw on the street, and to appear to me in spirit during the darkest hours of the night and in the days of the midday Sun.”

— Isabel Allende

427. “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them,” wrote Margaret Atwood.”

— Isabel Allende

428. “When I was a girl in my grandfather’s house, the men in the family had money, cars, and freedom to come and go anytime they wanted, as well as the authority to make all decisions, even the smallest ones, such as what would appear on the dinner menu. My mother had none of that; she lived off her father’s and older brother’s charity. She also had to protect her reputation. How much of that did I perceive? Enough to suffer for it.”

— Isabel Allende

429. “With age, you acquire a certain humility, Alexander. The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything. At your age, you can afford to commit the sin of arrogance, and it doesn’t matter much if you look ridiculous,” his grandmother lectured.”

— Isabel Allende

430. “I never accepted the limited feminine role imposed upon me by my family, society, culture, and religion. At fifteen I walked away from the church forever, not for lack of faith – that cam later – but because of the inherent machismo of all religious organizations. I cannot belong to an institution that considers me a second-class member whose authorities, always male, enjoy complete impunity and enforce their rules with dogma.”

— Isabel Allende

431. “They’re really good people. Quakers are always to be found where they’re most needed.”

— Isabel Allende

432. “It was a long week of penitence and fasting, during which there were no card games and no music that might lead to lust or abandon; and within the limits of possibility, the strictest sadness and chastity were observed, even though it was precisely at this time that the forked tail of the devil pricked most insistently at Catholic flesh.”

— Isabel Allende

433. “Words are free, she tried to say, and she appropriated them; they were all hers.”

— Isabel Allende

434. “Porque no soy una persona sociable, no tengo muchos amigos ni me gustan las fiestas o el bochinche, por el contrario, me siento mejor solo.”

— Isabel Allende

435. “Years sneak by quickly, on tiptoe, scoffing, and suddenly they give us a fright in the mirror or smack us on the back. Every minute is precious and we can’t waste it on misunderstanding, impatience, jealousy, pettiness, or the other silly stuff that soils relationships. In truth this formula can be applied at any age because it’s always the case that our days are limited. If I had lived this.”

— Isabel Allende

436. “The path to addiction is straight and well paved;.”

— Isabel Allende

437. “The General was right. No one dies of hunger here – you reach out your hand and pluck a mango. That’s why there is no progress. Cold countries have more advanced civilizations because the climate forces people to work.”

— Isabel Allende

438. “Mario Vargas Llosa’s.”

— Isabel Allende

439. “Patriarchy is imposed with aggression; it demands obedience and punishes those who defy it.”

— Isabel Allende

440. “The young soldier was part of the “Baby Bottle Conscription,” the boys called up when there were no more men, young or old, to fight the war.”

— Isabel Allende

441. “Miss Rose has decided that Eliza would have learning, dowry, and fame as a beauty even if she was not one, because it was her view that beauty is a question of style. Any woman who conducts herself with the queenly assurance of a belle, she maintained, will convince everyone that she is beautiful.”

— Isabel Allende

442. “She had loved her husband with the fierce loyalty of someone who does not question her destiny as a wife, but becoming a widow was a liberation for her.”

— Isabel Allende

443. “John Lennon said that life is what happens when we are busy making other plans.”

— Isabel Allende

444. “I have been training for years to be a passionate old woman, just as others train to climb mountains or play chess.”

— Isabel Allende

445. “I was a voracious reader and what I had learned in books confirmed that the world changes constantly and humanity evolves, but the changes are only obtained after much struggle.”

— Isabel Allende

446. “El amor siempre se me ha dado a medias.”

— Isabel Allende

447. “Alma Belasco had caught her attention. She stood.”

— Isabel Allende

448. “Gervasio Lonquimay.”

— Isabel Allende

449. “Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life.”

— Isabel Allende

450. “I grew up surrounded with secrets, mysteries, whispers, prohibitions, matters that must never be mentioned.”

— Isabel Allende