Isabel Allende Quotes

We don't have an explanation for everything that happens. We don't control almost anything. And if we are not open to that mystery, life becomes so small. ~ Isabel Allende

His lifetime was less than a fraction of a second in infinity. Or maybe he did not even exist; maybe human beings, the planets, everything in Creation were a dream ... an illusion. He smiled with humility when he remembered ... ~ Isabel Allende

My husband, who is a lawyer, is very careful with words and with the truth. He thinks that the truth exists, and it's something that is beyond questioning, which I think is totally absurd. I have several versions of how we met and how wonderful he was and all that. At least twenty. And I'm sure that they are all true. He has one. And I'm positive that it's not true. ~ Isabel Allende

Write what should not be forgotten. ~ Isabel Allende

After a few months without writing, months I've lived turned outward ... I fear going deaf, not being able to hear the silence. ~ Isabel Allende

Erotica is using a feather; pornograpy is using the whole chicken. ~ Isabel Allende

Happiness is pure kitch; we come into the world to suffer and learn. ~ Isabel Allende

My grandfather was dying, and told the family he had decided to die ... At that moment I wanted so badly to write and tell him that he was never going to die, that somehow he would always be present in my life, because he had a theory that death didn't exist, only forgetfulness did. He believed that if you can keep people in your memory, they will live forever. That's what he did with my grandmother. ~ Isabel Allende

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. ~ Isabel Allende

I have a very acute sense of place and time, so all of my stories are rooted in a place and a time. ~ Isabel Allende

Heroism is a badly remunerated occupation, and often it leads to an early end, which is why it appeals to fanatics or persons with an unhealthy fascination with death. ~ Isabel Allende

I was a very bad journalist. Awful. I would just invent everything. If I did an interview, I had a preconception of what that person should say and I would put my words in his mouth. ~ Isabel Allende

...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. ~ Isabel Allende

Friendship is all about trust and sharing. Passionate and romantic love is all about sex and emotions. You have to try to combine those, I think. The great marriages, the great couples I know, have both. ~ Isabel Allende

Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion. ~ Isabel Allende

Gringos invented two terms that are untranslatable into most languages: "snack" and "quickie," to refer to eating standing up and loving on the run . . . that, too, sometimes standing up. ~ Isabel Allende

Fear is like a black cavern that is terrifying. Once you enter the cavern and explore it, you realize that you can get out of it, go through it and get out of it. ~ Isabel Allende

Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. ~ Isabel Allende

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. ~ Isabel Allende

A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons. ~ Isabel Allende

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction. ~ Isabel Allende

I need to tell a story. It's an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later. ~ Isabel Allende

His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference. ~ Isabel Allende

A fixation is very stubborn: it burrows into the brain and breaks the heart. There are many fixations, but love is the worst. ~ Isabel Allende

A memoir is an invitation into another person's privacy. ~ Isabel Allende

Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed. ~ Isabel Allende

I don't want to die in pain or in an undignified way, I don't want any of the people I love to die in, die painfully. But I'm aware of the fact that they may die before I do and I have to part with them and take the loss. The hardest thing of love is to let go. But I think I can get let go of almost anybody. ~ Isabel Allende

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. ~ Isabel Allende

The calendar is a human invention; time does not exist on the spiritual level. ~ Isabel Allende

And what are we going to tell people?" exclaimed Doris. "That I'm old and crazy. That wouldn't be far off the mark," Alma replied. ~ Isabel Allende

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. ~ Isabel Allende

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. ~ Isabel Allende

The house was a vast labyrinth of books. Volumes were stacked from floor to ceiling on every wall, dark, crackling, redolent of leather bindings, smooth to the touch, with their gold titles and translucent gilt-edged pages and delicate typography. ~ Isabel Allende

Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span ... ~ Isabel Allende

The slave who dances is free ... while he is dancing. ~ Isabel Allende

Give, give, give - what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away? Of having stories if I don't tell them to others? Of having wealth if I don't share it? I don't intend to be cremated with any of it! It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world and with the divine. ~ Isabel Allende

January 8 has been a lucky day for me. I have started all my books on that day, and all of them have been well received by the readers. I write eight to ten hours a day until I have a first draft, then I can relax a little. I am very disciplined. I write in silence and solitude. I light a candle to call inspiration and the muses, and I surround myself with pictures of the people I love, dead and alive. ~ Isabel Allende

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

I try to let go of the intellect and just tell the story. I only read the page I have in front of me on the screen. Then when the whole story is told, I print it, wait a week and read it. ~ Isabel Allende

Autumn of the Patriarch, ~ Isabel Allende

The one that came really easy was the Japanese lover, because he's like a ghost in the book. He's always in the background like a spirit, like a shadow, almost. There's a very delicate line there. ~ Isabel Allende

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized. ~ Isabel Allende

Love is a free contract that begins with a spark and can end the same way. ~ Isabel Allende

It's going to go away because we all need silence. We all need time to reflect and think. I am not at all pessimistic about this. ~ Isabel Allende

Although stunned and hungry, many sang, because it would have been pointless to aggravate misfortune by complaining. ~ Isabel Allende

Real soup is to the body what peace is to the soul. ~ Isabel Allende

Just as Daniel Balalcazar said, it makes no sense to suffer in advance a misfortune that may never occur. ~ Isabel Allende

When I fall in love I'm obsessed. ~ Isabel Allende

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. ~ Isabel Allende

I don't think of literature as an end in itself. It's just a way of communicating something. ~ Isabel Allende

She went by the name of Belisa Crepusculario, not because she'd been born with it or baptized it, but because she herself had searched until she found the poetry of 'beauty' and 'twilight' and cloaked herself in it. She made her living selling words. ~ Isabel Allende

Color prejudice is so strong that if a woman has yellow hair, even if she has the face of an iguana, men turn to look at her in the street. ~ Isabel Allende

She did not believe that the world was a vale of tears but rather a joke that God had played and that it was idiotic to take it seriously. ~ Isabel Allende

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. ~ Isabel Allende

The heart is like a box; if it is filled with rubbish, there is no space for other things. ~ Isabel Allende

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

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. ~ Isabel Allende

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

Agosins poetic language engages the reader in a mesmerizing journey of inward reflection and exile. ~ Isabel Allende

Americans have a warrior's mentality, most of them. That's how this society was built. The fact that you own a gun and shoot to defend your life is a very American way of thinking. ~ Isabel Allende

What can we do with this happiness that appears for no obvious reason, the joy that needs no cause to exist? ~ Isabel Allende

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. ~ Isabel Allende

I went to a mystery writers conference ... and I learned a lot not only from the faculty - and in the faculty we had forensic doctors, detectives, policemen, experts in guns, etc. - but from the questions of the students. ~ Isabel Allende

Nostalgia is my vice. Nostalgia is a melancholy, and slightly saccharine, sentiment, like tenderness ~ Isabel Allende

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

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. ~ Isabel Allende

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

Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent. ~ Isabel Allende

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. ~ Isabel Allende

We only appreciate what we have when we lose it. ~ Isabel Allende

Barrabas came to us by the sea. ~ Isabel Allende

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? ~ Isabel Allende

Every life of a character is within a context. If I write detached from a social and political background, my story looks like a soap opera where everybody is indoors, not working and living off their emotions. ~ Isabel Allende

Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars. ~ Isabel Allende

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. ~ Isabel Allende

I'm very optimistic because I think that the real strength of a nation like the United States comes from blending cultures. There's no way that you can close the frontiers anywhere. The borders are there to be violated permanently. ~ Isabel Allende

We turn our backs on Latin America, always comparing ourselves instead to Europe. ~ Isabel Allende

I am very grateful for the success, because it has given me the freedom to write without pressure, in my own way, and has enabled me to maintain my family and educate my children and grandchildren, as well as to create a Foundation to empower women and girls. ~ Isabel Allende

I get hundreds of emails daily and a lot of feedback from people that are reading or have read my books. When I'm writing, or in my daily life, I just think of the work. I love to tell a story, but I might work with a story to make it the best I can without thinking of how many people will read it or if it will influence anybody. ~ Isabel Allende

When I'm scared - and I'm always scared when I have to face an audience, when I have to read a review, when I publish a book ... then, I think of my grandfather. My grandfather was this strong, tough Basque who would never bend ... What would he do? Well, he would go ahead, close his eyes, and drive forward. You do it and the spirit that is within you ... is there. ~ Isabel Allende

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

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

Two-thirds of those evacuated at that time had been born in the United States and were American citizens. Standing in long lines, the Japanese had to wait for hours in front of the desks of the officials, who took down their names and handed out labels for them to wear around their necks with their identity number, the same as for their luggage. ~ Isabel Allende

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

After fifty most of the bullshit is gone. ~ Isabel Allende

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 ... ~ Isabel Allende

The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down. ~ Isabel Allende

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 ~ Isabel Allende

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. ~ Isabel Allende

I have travelled all over the world and one thing that amazes me is that I can communicate with people. My story may be different but emotionally we are all the same. ~ Isabel Allende

True friendship resists time, distance and silence. ~ Isabel Allende

So firm did Nivea's determination become that she wrote in her diary that she would give up marriage in order to devote herself completely to the struggle for women's suffrage. She was not aware that such a sacrifice would not be necessary, and that she would marry a man for love who would back her up in her political goals. ~ Isabel Allende

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

Feminism has never been sexy, but let me assure you that it never stopped me from flirting, and I have seldom suffered from lack of men. ~ Isabel Allende

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. ~ Isabel Allende

But why give a man something it's so hard to earn? In that respect women are really thick. They're the daughters of rigidity. They need a man to feel secure but they don't realize that the one thing they should be afraid of is men. They don't know how to run their lives. They have to sacrifice themselves for the sake of someone else. Whores are the worst, patron, believe me. They throw their lives away working for some pimp, smile when he beats them, feel proud when he's well dressed, with his gold teeth and rings on his fingers, and when he goes off and takes up with a woman half their age they forgive him everything because 'he's a man. ~ Isabel Allende

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

I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the U.S. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family. ~ Isabel Allende

She treated him with the casual kindness usually reserved for other people's pets. ~ Isabel Allende

My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places. ~ Isabel Allende