Isabel Allende Quotes

The two moments are much alike: birth and death are made of the same fabric.
Isabel Allende
There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,' my mother explained shortly before she left me. 'If you can remember me, I will be with you always.
Isabel Allende
He understood then that all his exploits as a reporter, the feats that had won him such recognition and fame, were merely an attempt to keep his most ancient fears at bay, a stratagem for taking refuge behind a lens to test whether reality was more tolerable from that perspective.
Isabel Allende
But I don't want more things than I need, either.
Isabel Allende
He hoped that none of his descendants would get mixed up in politics, which was a trade for butchers and bandits.
Isabel Allende
Of all fragrances, the sweetest is that of virtue.
Isabel Allende
All you will have is the present. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.
Isabel Allende
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.
Isabel Allende
Wishes and fears are illusions, Dil Bahadur, not realities. You must practice detachment.
Isabel Allende
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.
Isabel Allende
He was not oppressed by a crowd because in the midst of all the hullabaloo he always found a quiet place for his soul.
Isabel Allende
She regretted nothing she had shared with her lover, nor was she ashamed of the fires that had changed her life; just the opposite, she felt that they had tempered her, made her strong, given her pride in making decisions and paying the consequences for them.
Isabel Allende
I've been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent stories to keep from boring the psychologist.
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
Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally.
Isabel Allende
I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before.
Isabel Allende
Until a few months ago we had a code of honor, and even the worst ruffians behaved with decency. You could leave your gold in a tent with no guard and no one would touch it, but now all that has changed. The law of the jungle rules, the only ideology is greed. Don't let yourself be parted from your weapons, and always travel in pairs or groups, because this is a land of thieves.
Isabel Allende
I'd realized that in writing happiness is useless-without suffering there is no story.
Isabel Allende
He said that knowledge was of little use without wisdom, and that there was no wisdom without spirituality, and that true spirituality always included service to others. As he explained many times, the essence of a good physician consisted of a capacity for compassion and a sense of the ethical, without which qualities the sacred art of healing degenerated into simple charlatanism.
Isabel Allende
We only have what we give.
Isabel Allende
I have the idea that we grandmothers are meant to play the part of protective witches; we must watch over younger women, children, community, and also, why not?, this mistreated planet, the victim of such unrelenting desecration. I would like to fly on a broomstick and dance in the moonlight with other pagan witches in the forest, invoking earth forces and howling demons; I want to become a wise old crone, to learn ancient spells and healers' secrets. It is no small thing, this design of mine. Witches, like saints, are solitary stars that shine with a light of their own; they depend on nothing and no one, which is why they have no fear and can plunge blindly into the abyss with the assurance that instead of crashing to earth, they will fly back out. They can change into birds and see the world from above, or worms to see it from within, they can inhabit other dimensions and travel to other galaxies, they are navigators on an infinite ocean of consciousness and cognition.
Isabel Allende
I go, but I always remember you.
Isabel Allende
write with honesty and don't worry about the feelings of others, because no matter what you say, they'll hate you anyway.
Isabel Allende
Writing is a calling, not a choice.
Isabel Allende
​Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is badly out of balance, in favor of men.
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
At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.
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 if He himself never had.
Isabel Allende
People do not belong to others, either. How can the huincas buy and sell people if they do not own them. Sometimes the boy went two or three days without speaking a word, surly, and not eating, and when asked what was the matter, the answer was always the same: "There are content days and there are sad days. Each person is a master of his silence.
Isabel Allende
My death..I mean..will it be quick,and with dignity? How will i know when the end is coming?""When you vomit blood,sir," Tao Chi'en said sadly.That happened three weeks later,in the middle of Pacific,in the privacy of the captain's cabin. As soon as he could stand , the old seaman cleaned up the traces of his vomit, rinsed out his mouth , changed his bloody shirt, lighted his pipe, and went to the bow of his ship , where he stood and looked for the last time at the stars winking in a sky of black velvet. Several sailors saw him and waited at a distance, caps in hands. When he had smoked the last of his tobacco, Captain John Sommers put his legs over the rail and noiselessly dropped into the sea.-Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende.
Isabel Allende
I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason.
Isabel Allende
I can promise you that women working together – linked, informed and educated – can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.
Isabel Allende
I would like to have been born a man, so I could leave too.
Isabel Allende
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.
Isabel Allende
I was alone, without a single cent, in an unknown country. If I'd learned anything from last year's ill-fated adventures, though, it was not to get overwhelmed by minor inconveniences.
Isabel Allende
Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.
Isabel Allende
Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.
Isabel Allende
I had a serious library at my disposal, because my Popo believed that culture entered by osmosis and it was better to start early, but my favorite books were fairy tales.
Isabel Allende
Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it.
Isabel Allende
Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compresses to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy....
Isabel Allende
This was a matter of some small group of guerrillas in some distant caves, a primitive, fanatical, and desperate people who didn't have the resources to intimidate the United States.
Isabel Allende
As my Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry, indelible, but I’m not going to be weighed down by them till I die. What’s done is done; I have to look ahead.
Isabel Allende
The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.
Isabel Allende
At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. 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. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.
Isabel Allende
Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentacostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy.
Isabel Allende
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.
Isabel Allende
They could not understand the advantage of living contrary to their inclinations in this world in order to enjoy a hypothetical well-being in another.
Isabel Allende
Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.
Isabel Allende
Mediante la fotografía y la palabra escrita intento desesperadamente vencer la condición fugaz de mi existencia, atrapar los momentos antes de que se desvanezcan, despejar la confusión de mi pasado.
Isabel Allende
الكتابة مثل الشعوذة : لايكفي إخراج أرنب من القبعة ، بل يجب عمل ذلك بأناقة وطريقة ممتعة
Isabel Allende
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
Isabel Allende
My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.
Isabel Allende
Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.
Isabel Allende
Write what should not be forgotten.
Isabel Allende
لقد عرف كيف يموت ، كما عرف كيف يعيش
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
Sadness and boredom were more bearable than the effort of living a normal life. Perhaps the idea of death began to hover over her during that period, as a kind of higher order of lassitude in which she would not have to move the blood in her veins or the air in her lungs; her repose would be absolute- not to think, not to feel, not to be.
Isabel Allende
Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change
Isabel Allende
How many times have I told you not to believe everything you hear? Seek truth for yourself.
Isabel Allende
You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found.
Isabel Allende