Top 500 Isabel Allende Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Desde entonces la gente lo recuerda como Juan del Pedo.”

— Isabel Allende

402. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

404. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

406. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

411. “He was proud of his calloused hands with cracked nails and dry red skin. “Working hands, honest hands,” he’d say.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

416. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

424. “Gervasio Lonquimay.”

— Isabel Allende

425. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Isabel Allende

431. “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

432. “The strong aroma of meat, fried onion, cumin, and baked dough soaked into my skin so deeply that I have never lost it. I will die smelling like an empanada.”

— Isabel Allende

433. “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

434. “Life was beautiful, and America was truly “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” a land where someone like Gregory could become President; all you had to do was stay pure of heart, love God and your mother, be forever faithful to one girl, respect the law, defend the weak, and scorn money – because heroes never expected to be compensated.”

— Isabel Allende

435. “You’ve completely forgotten what it takes to raise a child, Mr. Bogart. And this girl is traumatized – she misses her mother, she’s been pulled away from everything she knows, her family, her friends, her school, her community, her language. Can you imagine what that must be like?”

— Isabel Allende

436. “El sabio es siempre alegre.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

439. “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

440. “At the end of the conflict, young people questioned gender division imposed by ultranationalism, refused to be classified as male or female, and rejected the use of gender-based pronouns in favor of nonbinary ones. This practice arrived in Europe and the United States several years later.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

442. “It made her feel sorry for her husband: she was discovering how vulnerable to flattery a conceited old man could be.”

— Isabel Allende

443. “She embellished the facts, because she was aware that life is.”

— Isabel Allende

444. “In my case, it’s not so much wanting to live in Chile as it is the desire to recapture the certainty I feel there. That’s my home ground.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

446. “El individualismo se consideraba una forma de demencia.”

— Isabel Allende

447. “The road of gluttony leads straight to lust and, if traveled a little farther, to the loss of one’s soul.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende

449. “Love doesn’t grow like a wild plant, it needs a lot of care.”

— Isabel Allende

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

— Isabel Allende