Isabel Allende Quotes

I don't want an uneventful and safe life, I prefer an adventurous one.

I haven't forgotten. But if I fail you, you can rely on Cathy.

Capitaine Etienne Relais was known to be incorruptible in an ambience in which vice was the norm, honor for sale, and laws made to be broken, and men operated on the assumption that he who did not abuse power did not deserve to have it.

Twittering and blogging and all that is fine, but there is no idea of how to phrase something beautifully; how to use language to create an emotion. It's just passing information and sometimes very superficial information.

And I am not one of those women who trips twice over the same stone.

If you change the way you tell your own story, you can change the colour and create a life in technicolour.

Land is something one should never sell. It is the only thing left when all else is gone.

Every time I asked a question, that magnificent teacher, instead of giving the answer, showed me how to find it. She taught me to organise my thoughts, to do research, to read and listen, to seek alternatives, to resolve old problems with new solutions, to argue logically. Above all, she taught me not to believe anything blindly, to doubt, and to question even what seemed irrefutably true, such as man's superiority over woman, or one race or social class over another.

October 22, 2002 Yesterday, Alma, when at last we could meet to celebrate our birthdays, I could see you were in a bad mood. You said that all of a sudden, without us realizing it, we have turned seventy. You are afraid our bodies will fail us, and of what you call the ugliness of age, even though you are more beautiful now than you were at twenty-three. We're not old because we are seventy. We start to grow old as soon as we are born, we change every day, life is a continuous state of flux. We evolve. The only difference is that now we are a little closer to death. What's so bad about that? Love and friendship do not age. Ichi

It's such an intimate and profound relationship that it cannot be unconditional. I can only compare the intimacy of sex with the intimacy of the mother with a newborn baby. But with a newborn baby, it is unconditional.

A man who cooks is very sexy. A woman who cooks is not that sexy. Because it's associated in our mind to the domestic cliche of the woman.

I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously ... And now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand [its] existence ... It would be difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply fill these pages ...

When you make an omelet, as when you make love, affection counts for more than technique.

The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.

You're one of a kind, Kate!" Alex said, and smiled.
"We all are, Alexander.

Unfortunately for my family, they have a writer in the family.

Take. Her designs would be more refined than Vera's, because she did not intend to satisfy popular taste and create a brand, but to create for pleasure. The possibility of earning a living never occurred to her. She wasn't interested in scarves for ten dollars, or sheets

This is the kind of detail that is forbidden in literature; in a book, no one would dare combine a full moon with Frank Sinatra. The problem with fiction is that it must seem credible, while reality seldom is.

However, in those last months of riding across the golden landscape of California she felt she was flying free, like a condor. She was awakened one morning by the whinnying of her horse with the full light of dawn in her face, surrounded by tall sequoias that, like centenary guards, had watched over her sleep, by gentle hills, and, far in the distance, purple mountaintops; at that moment she was filled with an atavistic happiness that was entirely new. She realized that she had lost the feeling of panic that had lain curled in the pit of her stomach like a rat, threatening to gnaw her entrails. Her fears had dissipated in the awesome grandeur of this landscape. To the measure that she confronted danger, she was becoming bolder: she had lost her fear of fear. "I am finding new strength in myself; I may always have had it and just didn't know because I'd never had to call on it. I don't know at what turn in the road I shed the person I used to be, Tao. Now I am only one of thousands of adventurers scattered along the banks of these crystal-clear rivers and among the foothills of these eternal mountains. Here men are proud, with no one above them but the sky overhead; they bow to no one because they are inventing equality. And I want to be one of them. Some are winners with sacks of gold slung over their backs; some, defeated, carry nothing but disillusion and debts, but they all believe they are masters of their destiny, of the ground they walk on, of the future, of their own u

With women the best aphrodisiac is words.

Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.

Zacharie did not learn of the sorrow his wife was living becasue she was careful to hide it. Tete kept that first love, the stromngest in her life, a secret. She mentioned it only rarely because she could not offer Zacharie a passion of the same intensity; the relationship they shared was genntle and free of urgency.

The Indians' insistence on clinging to their customs had to be the work of Satan there was no other explanation which is why the friars went out to hunt down and lasso the deserters and then whipped their doctrine of
love and forgiveness into them.

We only appreciate what we have when we lose it.

Walking and walking across the world he will gradually find consolation, and one day, when he is too fatigued to take another step, he will realize that he cannot escape sorrow, he will have to tame it, so it doesn't harass him.

Hi. I'm on the run from the FBI, Interpol, and a Las Vegas criminal gang," I announced bluntly, to avoid any misunderstandings.
"Congratulations," he said.

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.

...the capital city had grown in alarming fashion: cardboard walls, tin roofs, people in rags clearly visible along the road from the airport. Since this made a very bad impression on visitors, for a long time the solution was to put up walls to hide them. As one politician said, 'Where there is poverty, hide it.

I have a hundred-year-old aunt who aspires to sainthood, and whose only wish has been to go into the convent, but no congregation, not even the Little Sisters of Charity, could tolerate her for more than a few weeks, so the family has had to look after her. Believe me, there is nothing so insufferable as a saint, I wouldn't sic one on my worst enemy.

From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there.

But I don't want more things than I need, either.

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.

My life has consisted of challenging authority, which I was taught as a young girl. Life is only noise between two abysmal silences. Silence before birth, silence after death.

Barrabas came to us by the sea.

I come from the so-called Third World (what is the Second)?

Before I start writing, before I have an idea of where and when the story happens, I research it thoroughly.

Memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.

I felt the strength of his desire, his hands at my waist, at the back of my neck, in my hair, his lips on my face and neck; I caught his young man's scent, heard his voice murmuring my name, and I felt blessed. How could I in less than a minute go from the sadness of having been abandoned to the joy of feeling loved?

The names of persons and living creatures demand respect, because when we speak to them we touch their heart and become a part of thier life force.

Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.

I write to understand my circumstances, to sort out the confusion of reality, to exorcise my demons. But most of all, I write because I love it!

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.

Time moves so slowly. Or perhaps it doesn't move at all and it is we who pass through it.

How many times have I told you not to believe everything you hear? Seek truth for yourself.

I strike the ground with the soles of my feet and life rises up my legs, spreads up my skeleton, takes possession of me, drives away distress and sweetens my memory. The world trembles.

This is to assuage our conscience, darling" she would explain to Blanca. "But it doesn't help the poor. They don't need charity; they need justice.

But even the most valiant and honorable men sometimes fail their women.

Autumn of the Patriarch,

In all social classes except the most privileged, abnegation and hard work are considered the supreme female virtues; a spirit of sacrifice is a question of honor: the more one suffers for family, the prouder one feels. Women are used to thinking of their mate as a foolish child whose every serious fault, from drunkenness to domestic violence, they forgive . . . because he's a man.

Their most notable defect was that they considered work a virtue, even manual labor. They were materialists, conquerors, and they were infused with a messianic enthusiasm for reforming those who did not think as they did; they did not, however, represent an immediate threat to civilization. No

For the first time in her life, Alba wanted to be beautiful. She regretted that the splendid women in her family had not bequeathed their attributes to her, that the only one who had, Rosa the Beautiful, had given her only the algae tones in her hair, which seemed more like a hairdresser's mistake then anything else. Miguel understood the source of her anxiety. He led her by the hand to the huge Venetian mirror that adorned one wall of their secret room, shook the dust from the cracked glass, and lit all the candles they had and arranged them around her. She stared at herself in the thousand pieces of the mirror. In the candlelight her skin was the unreal color of wax statues. Miguel began to caress her and she saw her face transformed in the kaleidoscope of the mirror, and she finally believed that she was the most beautiful woman in the universe because she was able to see herself with Miguel's eyes.

I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.

I'm not a fan of mysteries, so to prepare for this experience of writing a mystery I started reading the most successful ones in the market in 2012 ... And I realized I cannot write that kind of book. It's too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there's no redemption there.

The two moments are much alike: birth and death are made of the same fabric.

Before you conquer the mountain, you must learn to overcome your fear.

Accept the children the way we accept trees - with gratitude, because they are a blessing - but do not have expectations or desires. You don't expect trees to change, you love them as they are.

If, for example, I saw my grandparents or my daughter for an instant, would I recognize them? Probably not, because in looking so hard for a way to keep them alive, remembering them in the most minimal details, I have been changing them, adorning them with qualities they may not have had. I have given them a destiny much more complex than the ones they lived.

Moral crisis is produced when the same affluent Catholics who faithfully go to mass deny their workers a dignified wage.

I don't want to be looking inside my ego, my stuff, my achievements, my me, me, me, me, I hate that stuff. I just want to be out there eh to the last day of my life ah interested in the world, in causes, in helping other people. Um that doesn't mean that I don't have a spiritual practice, that I don't look at my own soul, that I don't prepare myself for the that transition that death is but I cannot sit in meditation to contemplate my navel for the rest of my life. That would be boring for me.

I stroke them, and they always like that, because old people don't have anyone who touches them, and I get them hooked on a TV series, because nobody wants to die before the final episode. Some of them find comfort in prayer, but there are lots of atheists here, and they don't pray. What's most important is not to leave them on their own.

For women in my lifetime things have changed quite a bit, but not enough. They have only changed for women that have education and access to health care in the Western world. But look at the rest of the world. Still in many places, women are sold into premature marriages, prostitution, forced labor; they are forced to have children that they cannot support or that they don't want. They are abused, tortured, exploited and even killed with impunity.

Tell Larry I'm not going to the reception, and that he can't count on me for anything for the rest of my life.

Do you truly believe that life is fair, Senor de la Vega?
-No, maestro, but I plan to do everything in my power to make it so.

We are all born happy. Life gets us dirty along the way, but we can clean it up. Happiness is not exuberant or noisy, like pleasure or joy; it's silent, tranquil, and gentle; it's a feeling of satisfaction inside that begins with self-love. You need to love yourself as I do, as all those who know you do, especially Alma's grandson.

I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.

There's a certain freshness and innocence in people who have always lived in one place and can count on witnesses to their passage through the world. In contrast, those of us who have moved on many times develop tough skin out of necessity. Since we lack roots or corroboration of who we are, we must put our trust in memory to give continuity to our lives...but memory is always cloudy, we can't trust it.

According to Cecilia, Valdivia's star rose when he met me and began to decline when he left me behind, a frightening theory because I do not want the glory for his successes or the guilt for his failures. Each of us is master of his or her own destiny.

Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.

You only have one life, but if you live it well, that's enough. The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy?

He had the intellectual capacity of a louse, but shone in cooking up new ways to be cruel.

Love is music, and sex is only the instrument ...

Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.

Everybody has losses - it's unavoidable in life. Sharing our pain is very healing.

Write with honesty and don't worry about the feelings of others, because no matter what you say, they'll hate you anyway.

Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages

I'm a writer. In Latin America, they say I'm a Latin-American writer because I also write in Spanish and my books are translated, but I am an American citizen and my books are published here, so I'm also an American writer.

He's a woman!" he shouted, horrified.
Padre Mendoza and the others came running up, only to stand and stare, mute with amazement, at the virginal breasts of the warrior.
"It's going to be much more difficult to kill him now," Padre Mendoza sighed finally.

Writers speak for those who are kept in silence

Sex is the instrument and love the music ...

There is room in the human heart for all the divinities.

Women are the only ones who will be able to eliminate the patriarchy, and when that happens all of us will win, men as much as women.

My mum said that as you age you have to smell good and be clean and don't hate anybody because that makes you older. Um I don't agree. I think that of course you have to smell good and be clean but there's much more that you have to do. Don't complain, exercise, be be strong, um work, be creative, be related to the world, have causes, fight for them passionately. I think all those things are important. I I'm not going to give up and just smell good.

I can't control life for my grandchildren, so how could I control a story? Sometimes I try to force something, and after working and working on that chapter, I realise that I am swimming against the current. I will never get there. So I have to let go of whatever previous idea I had about it and let the characters decide.

She was considered timid and morose. Only in the country, her skin tanned by the sun and her belly full of ripe fruit, running through the fields with Pedro Tercero, was she smiling and happy. Her mother said that that was the real Blanca, and that the other one, the one back in the city, was a Blanca in hibernation.

If what you want is the effect of painting, then paint, Aurora. If what you want is truth, learn to use your camera, he would say again and again

We all have an unsuspected reserve of strength inside that emerges when life puts us to the test.

Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.

saw females and children who appeared to

As soon as the period of mourning for Dona Ester was over and the big house on the corner was finished, Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle were married in a modest ceremony. Esteban gave his wife a set of diamond jewelry, which she thought beautiful. She packed it away in a shoe box and quickly forgot where she had put it. They spent their honeymoon in Italy and two days after they were on the boat. Esteban was as madly in love as an adolescent, despite the fact that the movement of the ship made Clara uncontrollably ill and the tight quarters gave her asthma. Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compress to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy and desired her with unjust intensity considering the wretched state to which she was reduced. On the fourth day at sea, she woke up feeling better and they went out on deck to look at the sea. Seeing her with her wind-reddened nose, and laughing at the slightest provocation, Esteban swore that sooner or later she would come to love him as he needed to be loved, even if it meant he had to resort to extreme measures. He realized that Clara did not belong to him and that if she continued living in her world of apparitions, three-legged chairs that moved of their own volition, and cards that spelled out the future, she probably never would. Clara's impudent and nonchalant sensuality was also not enough for him. He wanted far more than her body; he wanted control over that undefined and

The writer and the dreamer have so much in common: They can't control the plot, they are always part of the story or the dream.

Today's girls are tomorrow's women - and leaders.

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.

His wife ... always dressed in mourning for the children who died in infancy and squeezed breathless by the pressure of her corset, her religion, and the husband fate had dealt her

Every person is born with a talent, and happiness depends on discovering that talent in time ...

Our demons lose their power when we pull them out of the depths where they hide and look them in the face in broad daylight.

If you write nonfiction, a historical account of what really happened, first of all, it's always white men who do that, and you don't have the voices that are really interesting to me, of the people who are not sheltered by the big umbrella of the establishment.

There is no death, daughter.
People die only when we forget them.

In terrible moments, in moments of revolution, of war or repression, of illness or death, people react with incredible strength.

Captain John Sommers joined his brother and sister in the library, Do you remember Jacob Todd?
-The cad who defrauded us with that yarn about missions in Tierra del Fuego? asked Jeremy Sommers.
-The same ... He changed his name. Now he calls himself Jacob Freemont, and he's a newspaperman in San Francisco.
-Egad! So it is true that in the United States any scoundrel may begin a new life?
-Jacob Todd paid for his offense several times over. I think it is splendid that there is a country where a man can have a second chance.