Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “El sabio es siempre alegre.”

— Isabel Allende

402. “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

403. “That is what I am attempting in my stumbling spiritual practice: to rid myself of the negative feelings that prevent walking with assurance. I want to transform rage into creative energy and guilt into a mocking acceptance of my faults; I want to sweep away arrogance and vanity.”

— Isabel Allende

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

407. “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

408. “Women’s creativity is called craft and is sold cheap; when men create, the result is called art and is costly, like Maurizio Cattelan’s banana taped to a Miami art gallery wall with a price tag of US$120,000.”

— Isabel Allende

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “The truth is that men control political and economic power – they make the laws and apply them at their convenience –.”

— Isabel Allende

413. “El primer paso es admitir que uno carece de control sobre su vida.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

415. “Considering the circumstances, it was a rather good kiss. In reality, it would have been perfect if they both had not been coughing from the smoke.”

— Isabel Allende

416. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

421. “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

422. “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

423. “She was facing exile now with the same courage as she had done then, without complaining, without looking back, her eyes fixed on the future.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

425. “Passion is unbridled enthusiasm, exuberant energy, and determined devotion to someone or something.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

427. “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

428. “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

429. “Estaba harta de contemplar desde abajo los vellos de la nariz del resto de la humanidad.”

— Isabel Allende

430. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

432. “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

433. “There’s no feminism without economic independence.”

— Isabel Allende

434. “I can’t criticize mothers’ obsessive love because that’s probably the only reason why species have survived, from bats to technocrats. Nor.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

436. “Sometimes our fates take turns that we don’t notice in the moment they occur, but if you live as long as I have they become clear in hindsight. At each crossroads or fork we must decide which direction to take. These decisions may determine the course of the rest of our lives.”

— Isabel Allende

437. “Girls are denied the right to be angry and to thrash about.”

— Isabel Allende

438. “Creo que ha decidido morirse, y la ciencia no tiene remedio alguno contra ese mal.”

— Isabel Allende

439. “Mi vida se hace al contarla y mi memoria se fija con la escritura;.”

— Isabel Allende

440. “According to the Dalai Lama, the only hope for peace and prosperity lies in the hands of women in the West.”

— Isabel Allende

441. “All husbands are boring... No woman with ounce of sense gets married to be entertained, she marries to be maintained.”

— Isabel Allende

442. “Tijdens de lange reis in het voetspoor van een onmogelijke romance had Eliza iets verworden dat even waardevol was als de liefde: vrijheid.”

— Isabel Allende

443. “I wait for you to complete the voyage into yourself, for the old wounds to heal. I know that when you return from your nightmares, we shall again walk hand in hand, as before.”

— Isabel Allende

444. “Suggestion works miracles.”

— Isabel Allende

445. “I could never have invented such a clan. Actually, I had no need to, with a family like mine you don’t need imagination.”

— Isabel Allende

446. “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

447. “I took the opportunity to tell her about you, a stupendous young man, sensible and of solid principles, handsome, hardworking, and intelligent. Etelvina, who was serving the pie, froze with the knife in the air and asked me who I was talking about.”

— Isabel Allende

448. “Weinig oude mensen zijn tevreden, Irina. De meesten leven in armoede, met een gebrekkige gezondheid en zonder familie. Dit is de moeilijkste en kwetsbaarste fase van ons leven, erger nog dan je kinderjaren, want met de dag ga je verder achteruit en er wacht je geen andere toekomst dan de dood.”

— Isabel Allende

449. “Dicen que nunca se termina un libro, que simplemente el autor se da por vencido.”

— Isabel Allende

450. “Nathaniel Belasco had photographed his wife between 1977 and 1983, using one of the first twenty-by-twenty-four Polaroids capable of capturing the tiniest details with the utmost precision.”

— Isabel Allende