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At my age, people prefer to stay in a relationship that is not working. I do not understand that. I think it takes a lot of courage to separate. But it takes more energy to stay in something that is not working. -- Isabel Allende
I tried and tried to sleep, lulled by the movement, the purring of the motor, and the snores of the other passengers, but it's never been easy for me to sleep, and much less now, when I still have residues of the wild life running through my veins. -- Isabel Allende
I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres. -- 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
They were dressed in black, silent, and dry-eyed, as befits the norms of sadness in a country accustomed to the dignity of grief -- Isabel Allende
I have not changed; I am still the same girl I was fifty years ago and the same young woman I was in the seventies. I still lust for life, I am still ferociously independent, I still crave justice, and I fall madly in love easily. -- Isabel Allende
Everything that has to do with food is sensuous. In the United States, however, we are eating all the time. We have a problem with obesity. And yet, we don't enjoy food that much. -- Isabel Allende
My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places. -- 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
I'm not willing to sign a contract. They want everything. They want the rights to do the movie and everything else they can think of, forever. There's no limit to the contract. In this universe and universes to be discovered - I'm not making this up - this is in the contract. -- Isabel Allende
Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally. -- Isabel Allende
You have the health you deserve. -- Isabel Allende
True friendship resists time, distance and silence. -- Isabel Allende
We are too connected. There's noise in our heads all the time. -- Isabel Allende
Life is long, and the world is large. It is all a question of taking a chance. -- Isabel Allende
Writing is like riding a bicycle: you don't forget how, even if you go for years without doing it. -- Isabel Allende
But I don't want more things than I need, either. -- 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
Very few old folk are happy, Irina. Most of them are poor, aren't healthy, and have no family. It's the most fragile and difficult stage of life, more so than childhood, because it grows worse day by day, and there is no future other than death. -- 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
The biggest straitjacket is all the prejudices that we carry around, and all the fears. But what if we just surrender to the fear? There are things greater than fear. The great, wonderful quality of human beings is that we can overcome even absolute terror, and we do. -- Isabel Allende
I am frightened. I have known fear before, but there was always an escape; even during the terror of the military coup there was the salvation of exile. Now I am in a blind alley with all doors closed to hope, and I don't know how to handle so much fear. -- Isabel Allende
Nostalgia is my vice. Nostalgia is a melancholy, and slightly saccharine, sentiment, like tenderness -- Isabel Allende
That is the best part of writing: finding the hidden treasures, giving sparkle to worn out events, invigorating the tired soul with imagination, creating some kind of truth with many lies. -- Isabel Allende
I especially like your autumn trees, gracefully letting their leaves fall. That is how I would like to shed my own leaves in this autumn of life, easily and elegantly. Why be so attached to what we are bound to lose anyway? I suppose I mean youth, which has been so present in our conversations. -- Isabel Allende
You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not. -- 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
As Sancho said, money does not buy happiness but it does buy nearly everything else. -- Isabel Allende
I would like to be with my husband together sitting somewhere in a lonely place in the woods and take something, maybe some pills or something, a magic potion and die together. -- Isabel Allende
Agosins poetic language engages the reader in a mesmerizing journey of inward reflection and exile. -- Isabel Allende
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? -- Isabel Allende
People think that they will sit down and produce the great American novel in one sitting. It doesn't work that way. This is a very patient and meticulous work, and you have to do it with joy and love for the process, not for the outcome. -- 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
My female protagonist will not be this promiscuous, beautiful, dark-haired, thin lady. It will be a plump, blond, healer and so forth. -- Isabel Allende
The heart is like a box; if it is filled with rubbish, there is no space for other things. -- Isabel Allende
At the most difficult moments of my life, when it seemed that every door was closed to me, the taste of those apricots comes back to comfort me with the notion that abundance is always within reach, if only one knows how to find it. -- Isabel Allende
We all have an unsuspected reserve of strength inside that emerges when life puts us to the test. -- Isabel Allende
I was a political refugee living in Venezuela. I had a job that was twelve hours a day, no money. It was a hard time. -- Isabel Allende
I seek truth and beauty in the transparency of an autumn leaf, in the perfect form of a seashell on the beach, in the curve of a woman's back, in the texture of an ancient tree trunk, but also in the elusive forms of reality. -- 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
Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul. -- Isabel Allende
Aphrodite is about lust and gluttony - the only two sins worth committing, in my opinion. -- Isabel Allende
I never try to give a message in my books. It's about living with characters long enough to hear their voices and let them tell me the story. Sometimes I would love to have a happy ending, and it doesn't happen because the character or the story leads me in another direction. -- Isabel Allende
Love is a condition that tends to cloud men's reason, but it is not fatal. Usually all the patient needs is to have his love returned, and he will snap out of it and begin to sniff the air in search of new prey -- Isabel Allende
If this world is going to be a better place for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it will be women who make it so. -- Isabel Allende
There was no reason to fear the sea, only the living, because, despite their bad reputation, there was no evidence that the dead had ever attacked anyone; if anything, they were naturally timid -- 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
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
Of all fragrances, the sweetest is that of virtue. -- Isabel Allende
I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evenesce, to untangle the confusion of my past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing. -- Isabel Allende
Humanity has this need to hear stories because they connect us with other people, they teach us about our own feelings. We feel less lonely when we see other people going through the same things, even if they're fictional characters. -- Isabel Allende
I'm surrounded by the scene of aging. I myself am in my 70s and not getting any younger. Although I'm very healthy, and I have a lot of energy, and I still feel 50, I'm over 70 and I understand that I am preparing for later. -- 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
For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time. -- Isabel Allende
Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks. -- 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
His wife, Leanne, who came to his waist, looked like an undernourished adolescent with the face of a fly, but her fragility was deceptive: she had given birth to six male children and was expecting the seventh. She knew it would be male because God was determined to test her patience. -- Isabel Allende
I want to have an epic life. I want to tell my life with big adjectives. I want to forget all the grays in between, and remember the highlights and the dark moments. -- Isabel Allende
I must not linger on details, daughter, because if we dally, this account may be left unfinished, and no one wants to read hundreds of quartos only to find that the story has no clear ending. -- Isabel Allende
Every person is born with a talent, and happiness depends on discovering that talent in time ... -- Isabel Allende
I realized that she had simply fulfilled her mission in this life and that she had escaped another dimension where her spirit, finally free of its material burden, would be more at home -- Isabel Allende
I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books. -- Isabel Allende
Only that, nothing more - a tiny beam of light to show some hidden aspect of reality, to help decipher and understand it and thus to initiate, if possible, a change in the conscience of some readers. -- Isabel Allende
But that's how nostalgia is: a slow dance in a large circle. Memories don't organize themselves chronologically, they're like smoke, changing, ephemeral, and if they're not written down they fade into oblivion. -- 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
The two moments are much alike: birth and death are made of the same fabric. -- Isabel Allende
I'm open to love, and I think that I will fall in love with a wonderful man. -- Isabel Allende
His house of cards had collapsed, and he lay among the ruins - but he was free. He felt euphoric, weightless, years younger. The only thing he missed was Indiana, but she too belonged to the past; she too had been carried off by the wind. -- 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
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
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
There is room in the human heart for all the divinities. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
In my private circle I am a mother, grandmother, wife, friend, daughter ... the success means nothing to my small tribe. -- Isabel Allende
I don't think that we have to look like the models in the magazines because they are 19 year olds and they have been photo shopped extensively, not but given what I, we have as the raw material, take care of it. -- Isabel Allende
In times of conflict, war, poverty or religious fundamentalism, women and children are the first and most numerous victims. Women need all their courage today. -- 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
Writing is my job. I don't think of it as art. -- Isabel Allende
Because I have time to spare, and for the first time in my life nobody expects anything of me. I don't have to prove anything, I'm not rushing everywhere; each day is a gift I enjoy to the fullest. -- Isabel Allende
I never try to convey a message, I just want to tell a story. Why that story in particular? I have no idea, but I have learned to surrender to the muse. I become obsessed with a theme or with certain stories; they haunt me for years, and finally, I write them. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
I feel that telling my secrets makes me less vulnerable. What would make me vulnerable are the secrets I keep. -- Isabel Allende
That was the beginning of the revolution. Many years have gone by and blood keeps running, soaking the soil of Haiti, but I am not there to weep. -- Isabel Allende
I love my dog unconditionally, but never the man I'm sleeping with. -- Isabel Allende
The longest, most solid and complex relationship in my life is with my mother. It started before I was born, and now, when I am 71 and living in California and she is 92 and living in Chile, we are still in touch daily. -- Isabel Allende
Full belly, happy heart, was the favorite saying of Padre Mendoza, who had been obsessed with good nutrition ever since he'd heard of sailors suffering from scurvy when a lemon could have prevented their agony. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse. -- Isabel Allende
At the time I had never lived with a woman, so I could hardly miss something I had not grown accustomed to -- 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
We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome. -- Isabel Allende
I rebelled against all form of authority, against my grandfather, my step-father, the Church, the police, the government, the bosses. Everything male that was there, and was determining my life. -- Isabel Allende
Empowering women means trusting them. -- 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
Far away from my country I would be like those trees they chop down at Christmastime, those poor rootless pines that last a little while and then die. -- Isabel Allende
They would regret that they had not killed him; he would get out of that hole and find Juliana sooner or later, even if he had to pursue her to hell itself. "Oh, you won't have to go that far, we are on our way to California," Diego said in farewell -- Isabel Allende
That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- 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
If we don't begin by imagining the perfect society, how shall we create one? -- Isabel Allende
I thought liberation had to do with going out into the world and assuming male duties, not with delegating part of my load. The result was a terrible fatigue, as witnessed today by the millions of women of my generation who question feminist movements. -- 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
I was not supposed to be in any way a liberated person. I was a female born in the '40s in a patriarchal family; I was supposed to marry and make everyone around me happy. -- Isabel Allende
For real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world. We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men. -- Isabel Allende
She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying. -- Isabel Allende
We've lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions without meaning. -- Isabel Allende
The most poor and backward areas in the world are those in which women are subjugated and exploited. Improving the situation of the woman improves the family, the community, and by extension the whole country. -- Isabel Allende
Autumn of the Patriarch, -- Isabel Allende
When my daughter Paula died, I was in the deepest pain, and my mother said, "This kind of sorrow is like a long, narrow, dark channel. You have to walk this channel alone and be sure that there is light at the other ending. Just keep walking." -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
I try to write the kind of books I like to read. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
My life is about ups and downs, great joys and great losses. -- Isabel Allende
When I fall in love I'm obsessed. -- Isabel Allende
I think that my life changed at 50. Many things happened. Menopause, the end of youth and my daughter died that year after being a whole year in a coma. So I think that I changed and I became an elder at 50. -- Isabel Allende
How many times have I told you not to believe everything you hear? Seek truth for yourself. -- 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
The simple recipe for success that Mendel had instilled in his children from the cradle on consisted in never complaining, never asking for anything, striving to be the best in everything you do, and never trusting anyone. -- Isabel Allende
The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing. -- Isabel Allende
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, -- Isabel Allende
Many children fly like birds, guess other people's dreams, and speak with ghosts, but ... they all outgrow it when they lose their innocence. -- Isabel Allende
I'm always following the characters and I'm always interested in what happens to them, but what happens to them is conditioned by the circumstances in which they live. -- Isabel Allende
A slave lacks incentives; for him it is better to work slowly and badly, since his effort benefits only the master, but free people work hard to save and get ahead,, that is their incentive. -- Isabel Allende
Most people feel younger than their age, but the culture values youth, success, beauty, productivity. There is no space in this culture for older people. -- Isabel Allende
I was born in the middle of World War II, the middle of the Holocaust; I was born when there was no declaration of human rights, when feminism was not an issue, when children were working in factories. I mean, today's world is a better place! -- Isabel Allende
I read on my iPad when I travel. I listen to audiobooks in the car. I read books in my bedroom, where I have a comfortable couch, a lamp and two dogs to keep me warm. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- 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
I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember? -- Isabel Allende
A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration. -- Isabel Allende
I remember my childhood as a horrible time. My mother says that nothing so horrible ever happened to me as the things that I remember. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
Alma Belasco had caught her attention. She stood -- Isabel Allende
He had a presentiment that their fates would be intertwined, but immediately rejected it; he always tried to avoid falling into the traps of intuition. -- Isabel Allende
All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom. -- Isabel Allende
Indiana was such a devout disciple of Shakti that she had once considered taking her name until her father, Blake Jackson, managed to convince her that a Hindu goddess's name was not appropriate for a tall, voluptuous blond American with the looks of an inflatable doll. -- Isabel Allende
It was then that I understood that the days of Colonel Garcia and all those like him are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women (Allende 429) -- Isabel Allende
A memoir is an invitation into another person's privacy. -- Isabel Allende
I have a foot here and a foot in some spirit world. There are many more layers to reality, and that permeates my life and my writing in a very natural way. I don't even think about it. -- Isabel Allende
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
My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's. -- Isabel Allende
Be careful what you ask of Heaven; it might be granted. -- Isabel Allende
How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak? -- Isabel Allende
The fear is not real, Dil Bahadur; it is only in your mind, like all other things. Our thoughts form what we believe to be reality. -- Isabel Allende
No complaining about how hard it is to write, we are all so, so lucky to write, to sit down, inside, and write words on paper. There is no greater freedom, no greater good, nothing that brings more joy. -- Isabel Allende
The hardest thing of love is to let go. -- Isabel Allende
If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving ... -- 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
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. -- Isabel Allende
The pain of losing my child was a cleansing experience. I had to throw overboard all excess baggage and keep only what is essential. -- Isabel Allende
I'm surrounded by young people. I'm always now the oldest and the shortest person in the room. -- Isabel Allende
Sometimes I have these premonitions and I don't forget them, so I will be prepared when they happen. -- 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
I confess that I am a messy, disorganized and impatient reader: if the book doesn't grab me in the first 40 pages, I abandon it. I have piles of half-read books waiting for me to get acute hepatitis or some other serious condition that would force me to rest so that I could read more. -- Isabel Allende
He missed his venerable master, who had marked him forever with a thirst for knowledge as persistent as the drunk's thirst for alcohol or the ambitious man's thirst for power. He no longer had his mentor's library or his inexhaustible fount of experience. -- Isabel Allende
Typical Chilean characteristics, such as sobriety, a horror of ostentation, of standing out over others or attracting attention, generosity, a tendency to compromise rather than confront, a legalistic mentality, respect for authority, resignation to bureaucracy, enthusiasm for political argument, -- Isabel Allende
It is a wonderful truth that things we want most in life-a sense of purpose, happiness and hope-are most easily attained by giving them to others. -- Isabel Allende
I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic. -- Isabel Allende
I carry around a little stool to stand on when people want a picture with their cellular phones. -- Isabel Allende
She has a fixation on love. Strong trouble. The girl left her window open one clear night and it crawled into her body while she was asleep. There's no spell can cure it. -- Isabel Allende
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
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. -- Isabel Allende
Moral crisis is produced when the same affluent Catholics who faithfully go to mass deny their workers a dignified wage. -- Isabel Allende
Gervasio Lonquimay -- Isabel Allende
I stopped examining myself in the mirror to compare myself to the perfect beauties of movies and magazines; I decided I was beautiful
for the simple reason that I wanted to be. And then never gave the matter a second thought. -Eva Luna -- Isabel Allende
One of the characteristics of North American culture is that you can always start again. You can always move forward, cross a border of a state or a city or a county, and move West, most of the time West. You leave behind guilt, past traditions, memories. -- Isabel Allende
The media could do a much better job, that's for sure, especially the media that targets women ... Human rights? They couldn't care less! -- 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
Years later my Popo would laugh and tell people that if she hadn't knocked him out in the first round, he'd still be wandering around in love with the stars. -- Isabel Allende
I get thousands of letters, and they give me a feeling of how each book is perceived. Often I think I have written about a certain theme, but by reading the letters or reviews, I realise that everybody sees the book differently. -- Isabel Allende
I called him Grandfather, because according to him you do not have to be of the same blood or same tribe to be a member of the same family, but in truth I should have called him Maman. He was the only mother I ever knew. -- Isabel Allende
In my book tours I get to meet an audience every night. And I see that there are mostly young people, and there are a lot of more men than before, but always young, I don't get older men. As I'm getting older, my audience gets younger! -- Isabel Allende
The writer of good will carries a lamp to illuminate the dark corners. -- Isabel Allende
Women have always been courageous ... They are always fearless when protecting their children and in the last century they have been fearless in the fight for their rights. -- Isabel Allende
Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me. -- 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
She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh -- 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 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! -- Isabel Allende
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. -- 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
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
I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better. -- Isabel Allende
When you make an omelet, as when you make love, affection counts for more than technique. -- 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 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
Writing is a constant exercise in longing. -- Isabel Allende
We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent. -- Isabel Allende
Write what should not be forgotten. -- Isabel Allende
I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist - although the term had not reached Chile yet, so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me. -- Isabel Allende
On a Tuesday, September 11th, 1973, we had the military coup in Chile that forced me to leave my country eventually. And then, on a Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, we had the terrorist attack in the United States. -- 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
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 do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's 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
When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture. -- Isabel Allende
Before I start writing, before I have an idea of where and when the story happens, I research it thoroughly. -- Isabel Allende
I'd realized that in writing happiness is useless-without suffering there is no story. -- Isabel Allende
There is no death, daughter.
People die only when we forget them. -- Isabel Allende
Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously. -- Isabel Allende
I have become an American citizen, and I love this country. I think that this country has incredible potential for goodness, an incredible possibility for doing the wrong thing, too. -- Isabel Allende
sin sufrimiento, no hay historia -- Isabel Allende
Giving women education, work, the ability to control their own income, inherit and own property, benefits the society. If a woman is empowered, her children and her family will be better off. If families prosper, the village prospers, and eventually so does the whole country. -- Isabel Allende
All the women and girls she knew, free or not, belonged to a man: father, husband, or Jesus. -- Isabel Allende
Everybody has losses - it's unavoidable in life. Sharing our pain is very healing. -- 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
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
Affection is like the noonday sun; it does not need the presence of another to be manifest. -- Isabel Allende
I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form. -- 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
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
When a man's earning his living doing things he doesn't like, he feels like a slave; when he's doing what he loves, he feels like a prince. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
You only have what you give. It's by spending yourself that you become rich. -- Isabel Allende
Everything I write has to be connected to my life. One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women. -- Isabel Allende
He almost caused a riot among the ladies; he filled all the empty space, as if someone had let a tiger loose in this world of female longing. Even -- Isabel Allende
At five I was already a feminist, and nobody used the word in Chile yet. -- Isabel Allende
I was a romantic and sentimental creature, with a tendency towards solitude. -- Isabel Allende
It's easy to judge others when we are not going through the same thing. -- Isabel Allende
I write a letter to my mother every day, because in that letter, I write down my day. And if I don't write it down, then tomorrow I will forget it and it's gone. -- Isabel Allende
I haven't forgotten. But if I fail you, you can rely on Cathy. -- Isabel Allende
Happiness is slippery, it slithers away between your fingers, but problems are something you can hold on to, they've got handles, they're rough and hard -- 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
that were to drive us to the port to -- Isabel Allende
The first two, three, four weeks are wasted. I just show up in front of the computer. Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too. If she doesn't show up invited, eventually she just shows up. -- 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
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
Although women do two-thirds of the world's labor, they own less than one percent of the world's assets. -- 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
I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile. -- Isabel Allende
Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you. -- Isabel Allende
I would like to have been born a man, so I could leave too. -- Isabel Allende
Having a point to start is important. You know that when you decide to write something it's like a commitment. It's like falling in love. -- 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
Writing is a calling, not a choice. -- Isabel Allende
Everyone is born with some special talent ... -- Isabel Allende
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 -- Isabel Allende
Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion. -- Isabel Allende
Society decides when we get old. But the spirit never ages. -- Isabel Allende
Someone has said that conversation is sex for the soul. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
People are afraid of falling in love because they don't want to suffer. -- Isabel Allende
alive who have read the three complete volumes of the ageless epic La Araucana, in rhyme and old Spanish. -- 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 world is a very unjust, unfair place and we have to live with that. Historically, there is impunity for most crimes. -- Isabel Allende
Kids are smart: don't underestimate their bull detector. Contemporary kids have access to a lot of information, so don't even try to fool them. I have never been more nervous about my research than when writing for young adults because they pick up every single error. -- Isabel Allende
We only have what we give. -- 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
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 -- Isabel Allende
I don't want posterity, I don't want anybody to remember me in any way. I don't care about that because I'll be dead. I think the spirit will move to some other state. -- Isabel Allende
at least as old as synthetic penicillin - you -- Isabel Allende
Words are free, she tried to say, and she appropriated them; they were all hers. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
I never thought that I would come to live in the United States. I was not pursuing the American dream. -- Isabel Allende
My poor Isabel. Here, take this and write. Unburden your heart; if you don't you are going to die of anguish. -- Isabel Allende
The success occurs in a place outside of me, and doesn't touch me on an intimate level. I live in my own skin, I have not changed greatly, I remain the same woman. -- Isabel Allende
You spend the first part of your life collecting things ... and the second half getting rid of them. -- Isabel Allende
I have been a woman for 46 years and I only recently realized I can't change it and I like it. -- 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. -- Isabel Allende
You would give your life for your little baby. It's not the same when you are in a sexual relationship unless you feel that you are loved as you love. -- Isabel Allende
I must not get ahead of myself. If I do not narrate the events of my life with rigor and harmony, I will lose my way. -- Isabel Allende
there was only one aristocracy, that of decency, and that this was not inherited or bought with money or titles, but was only gained through good deeds. -- Isabel Allende
Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives. -- Isabel Allende
I get up every morning early, when the sky is red, and write for 10 hours. -- Isabel Allende
I met a guy, very exotic to me - he was blonde with blue eyes - and I just had a fling that turned out to be love. I moved to San Francisco to spend a week with him and get him out of my system; I'm still here 26 years later. -- Isabel Allende
Everyone has a story, the air is full of stories. The creative process is mysterious, I don't know why it is that suddenly a theme will take hold of me and refuse to leave me in peace until I investigate it and write it. -- Isabel Allende
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
My writing comes not from the happy moments, but from struggle and grief. -- Isabel Allende
She entered the place of her dreams along a much traveled path and returned treading very carefully in order not to shatter the tenuous visions against the harsh light of consciousness. -- Isabel Allende
Love is music, and sex is only the instrument ... -- Isabel Allende
Nothing strong can be built on a foundation of lies and omissions. -- Isabel Allende
Barrabas came to us by the sea. -- Isabel Allende
I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans. -- Isabel Allende
I am happier when I love than when I am loved. I adore my husband, my son, my grandchildren, my mother, my dog, and frankly, I don't know if they even like me. But who cares? Loving them is my joy. -- Isabel Allende
One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women. I always write about women who are marginalized, who have no means or resources and somehow manage to get out of those situations with incredible strength - and that is more important than anything. -- Isabel Allende
In terrible moments, in moments of revolution, of war or repression, of illness or death, people react with incredible strength. -- Isabel Allende
Eros is very close to death. And both things, in a way, balance each other. -- Isabel Allende
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 -- Isabel Allende
When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart. -- Isabel Allende
He realized ... that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious. -- Isabel Allende
Writing, when all is said and done, is an attempt to understand one's own circumstance and to clarify the confusion of existence, including insecurities that do not torment normal people, only chronic nonconformists, many of whom end up as writers after having failed in other undertakings. -- Isabel Allende
She awoke from a long childhood in which she had always been protected and surrounded by attention and comforts, with no responsibilities. -- Isabel Allende
What happens in the world affects me. Sometimes, that's part of the writing. -- Isabel Allende
In Venezuela, when I was living there, crime was growing. You couldn't feel safe anywhere. You couldn't leave your car in the street because it would be stolen. You coun't live in your house if you didn't have a high-security alarm system, because you would be burglarized seven times a week. -- 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
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
You write a book and it's like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You don't know if it will ever reach any shores. And there, you see, sometimes it falls in the hands of the right person. -- Isabel Allende
You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descent to hell. -- Isabel Allende
A novel is like a window, open to an infinite landscape. -- Isabel Allende
Before the military coup in Chile, we had the idea that military coups happen in Banana Republics, somewhere in Central America. It would never happen in Chile. Chile was such a solid democracy. And when it happened, it had brutal characteristics. -- Isabel Allende
At my age days dissolve like salt in water; the day's gone and I don't even know what I've done with the hours. -- Isabel Allende
I have written about Chile extensively, and therefore I have read many books on the subject, mostly for research. -- Isabel Allende
I'm not above anybody. I'm, I'm not better than anybody. I am made of the same material that everybody else is and if somebody can be a saint, so can I and if somebody can be a torturer, so can I. -- Isabel Allende
Writers speak for those who are kept in silence -- Isabel Allende
I tried to show my affection and gratitude with small attentions, but he would not allow it; he was not used to receiving affection, although it was his nature to squander it on others. -- Isabel Allende
My mother didn't want me to be a feminist, a radical, political person, because she was scared. She wanted me to be protected and safe, but my life never was. -- Isabel Allende
Reading is like looking through several windows which open to an infinite landscape ... For me life without reading would be like being in prison, it would be as if my spirit were in a straightjacket; life would be a very dark and narrow place. -- 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
Awake it was difficult to find anything in that chaotic clutter, but asleep she could ... when the contours of reality were as faint as a tracery of pale ink. -- Isabel Allende
I was such a sullen, angry, sad kid. I'm sure there are writers who have had happy childhoods, but what are you going to write about? No ghosts, no fear. I'm very happy that I had an unhappy and uncomfortable childhood. -- Isabel Allende
The Germans are not a race of psychopaths, Alma. They're normal people like you and me, but with fanaticism, power, and impunity, anyone can turn into a monster, like the SS at Auschwitz, he told his sister. -- Isabel Allende
We only appreciate what we have when we lose it. -- Isabel Allende
You couldn't find two people more different than my mother and I. There are a thousand things about me that she fought against. -- Isabel Allende
Real soup is to the body what peace is to the soul. -- Isabel Allende
There is no light without shadow, just as there is no happiness without pain. -- Isabel Allende
You're one of a kind, Kate!" Alex said, and smiled.
"We all are, Alexander. -- Isabel Allende
He had a principle: if you lend money and never see the person again, that's money well spent. -- Isabel Allende
He had the intellectual capacity of a louse, but shone in cooking up new ways to be cruel. -- Isabel Allende
It was an election year and there was reason for concern over the turn of events. The country was waking up. The wave of discontent that was stirring the people was beginning to strike at the heart of that oligarchic society. -- Isabel Allende
saw females and children who appeared to -- Isabel Allende
Meditation helps. -- Isabel Allende
When everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars -- Isabel Allende
I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing. -- 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
They taught using an Italian system of experimental education in which the students did whatever the fuck we wanted. -- Isabel Allende
Fiction happens in the belly, it doesn't happen in the brain. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
When love exists, nothing else matters, not life's predicaments, not the fury of the years, not a physical winding down or scarcity of opportunity. -- Isabel Allende
Hitchhiking and sleeping in cemeteries. (He explained to me that they're very safe, no one goes there at night.) -- 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
Life is very mysterious and there are many things we don't know. And there are elements of magic realism in every culture, everywhere. It's just accepting that we don't know everything and everything is possible. -- Isabel Allende
She accused him of having grandiose ideas and sloppy habits, a fatal combination for a writer. -- Isabel Allende
I don't want an uneventful and safe life, I prefer an adventurous one. -- Isabel Allende
And the truth is that if a writer is successful, you gain readers. It benefits all the writers. It's important for all the writers that as many of us as possible be successful. -- Isabel Allende
Only in romance novels or in thrillers people live outside of a social and political context. -- Isabel Allende
Dying is not easy. It's a very hard transition. -- Isabel Allende
All husbands are boring... No woman with ounce of sense gets married to be entertained, she marries to be maintained. -- Isabel Allende
The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years. -- Isabel Allende
that in itself age doesn't make anyone better or wiser, but only accentuates what they have always been. -- Isabel Allende
I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences. -- 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
Childhood is a naturally unhappy period of our existence, Lillian. It was Walt Disney who invented the notion that it has to be happy, simply to make money. -- Isabel Allende
I have lived with passion and in a hurry, trying to accomplish too many things. I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year, and I took care of her at home until she died in my arms in December of 1992. -- Isabel Allende
We turn our backs on Latin America, always comparing ourselves instead to Europe. -- 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
I had a very rough childhood and not a happy one and by age 15 I was an old person in many ways. I knew that I had to take care of myself, I um and I always did. -- Isabel Allende
Fiction happens in the womb. It doesn't get processed in the mind until you do the editing. -- Isabel Allende
Today's girls are tomorrow's women - and leaders. -- Isabel Allende
Feminism is not dead, by no means. It has evolved. If you don't like the term, change it, for Goddess' sake. Call it Aphrodite, or Venus, or bimbo, or whatever you want; the name doesn't matter, as long as we understand what it is about, and we support it. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
Some people connect with a story and may find between the lines something that might be useful to him or her, but that's not the intention of the author, I think. At least not mine. -- Isabel Allende
His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference. -- Isabel Allende
He had a booming laugh that bubbled up from the bowels of the earth and shook him from head to toe. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
I go, but I always remember you. -- 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
If I can write it, I can cope. And I've been writing many books, but in every book, I try to explore something in my own soul that I need to solve, I need to understand. -- Isabel Allende
The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything. -- Isabel Allende
I don't think the world will destroy itself in a nuclear cataclysm. On the contrary, we have the capacity to save ourselves and save the planet, and we will use it. -- Isabel Allende
Memory is fragile and capricious; each of us remembers and forgets according to what is convenient. The past is a notebook with many leaves on which we jot down our lives with ink that changes according to our state of mind. -- Isabel Allende
I like Hillary Clinton a lot. I know her. -- Isabel Allende
Although stunned and hungry, many sang, because it would have been pointless to aggravate misfortune by complaining. -- Isabel Allende
And I've gained spirituality. I'm aware that before, death was is the neighborhood. Now, it's next door, or in my house. I try to live mindfully and be present in the moment. -- Isabel Allende
My father left when I was three, and I have no memory of him. The most significant male figures in my life were my grandfather, in whose house I lived during the first 10 years of my childhood, and later my stepfather. -- 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
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
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
The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down. -- Isabel Allende
My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left. -- Isabel Allende
Sisters: talk to each other, be connected and informed, form women's circles, share your stories, work together, and take risks. Together we are invincible. -- Isabel Allende
The point was not to die, since death came anyway, but to survive, which would be a miracle. -- Isabel Allende
If I didn't write my soul would dry up and die. -- Isabel Allende
The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses. -- Isabel Allende
She intended to swallow the world and he lived crushed by reality. -- Isabel Allende
He had only to touch me to turn my tears into sighs and my anger to desire. How accomodating love is; it forgives everything. -- Isabel Allende
Those who seek the truth run the risk of finding it. -- Isabel Allende
We want a world where life is preserved, and the quality of life is enriched for everybody, not only for the privileged. -- Isabel Allende
You're going to have time to get bored, Maya. Take advantage of it to write down the monumental stupidities you've committed, see if you can come to grips with them, -- Isabel Allende
If nothing hurts, that means I woke up dead, -- Isabel Allende
My books are based on emotions, feelings, relationships. In these areas women are experts, so it's not strange that the main characters of my novels are females. -- Isabel Allende
Words are not that important when you recognize intentions. -- Isabel Allende
I don't think of literature as an end in itself. It's just a way of communicating something. -- Isabel Allende
I write until the first draft is finished, and then I feel that I can get out. But, during the time of the writing of the first draft, I don't go out. I'm just locked away, writing. It's a time of meditation, of going into the story. -- 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
I am an American citizen and it is my home now. I like the U.S.A., which is not a place too many people have liked since Bush. The U.S. has a young population, and everything can change within a year. -- 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
The only good thing about marriage is becoming a widow -- Isabel Allende
Land is something one should never sell. It is the only thing left when all else is gone. -- Isabel Allende
I was a lousy journalist. I could never be objective. Sometimes I invented the whole story. -- Isabel Allende
Peace requires everyone to be in the circle - wholeness, inclusion. -- Isabel Allende
If I had to choose between a relative and a good story, I would take the story. -- Isabel Allende
Before you conquer the mountain, you must learn to overcome your fear. -- Isabel Allende
Conceit is a privilege of the ignorant; the wise man is humble because he knows how little he knows. -- Isabel Allende
I need to remember to overcome. -- Isabel Allende
With women the best aphrodisiac is words. -- Isabel Allende
Unfortunately for my family, they have a writer in the family. -- Isabel Allende
Wishes and fears are illusions, Dil Bahadur, not realities. You must practice detachment. -- Isabel Allende
Just as Daniel Balalcazar said, it makes no sense to suffer in advance a misfortune that may never occur. -- Isabel Allende
Youth is not a period in life but a state of mind. -- Isabel Allende
Happiness is pure kitch; we come into the world to suffer and learn. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
And that fox escaped with his tail between his legs, with all of the hens chasing after him -- Isabel Allende
It is common knowledge that no man that women flock to boasts of his conquests. Those who do, lie. -- Isabel Allende
I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English. -- Isabel Allende
A man does what he can; a woman does what a man cannot. -- Isabel Allende
Time moves so slowly. Or perhaps it doesn't move at all and it is we who pass through it. -- Isabel Allende
My desk is like a 'U,' so I have my computer and lots of dictionaries because I write in Spanish and I live in English. -- 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
In my lifetime, the world has become better, not worse. And the world is moving, very slowly but surely with more democracy and more liberal way of thinking, more inclusion and more diversity. -- Isabel Allende
But even the most valiant and honorable men sometimes fail their women. -- Isabel Allende
I'm such a control freak. I want to control even my own death. Decide when I will die and how. -- Isabel Allende
Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. -- 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
Remember that all the others are more afraid than you -- Isabel Allende
The world starts to exist, for Americans, when we are in conflict with a place. And then all of a sudden, Afghanistan pops up on the TV screen and it becomes a place. And it exists for three weeks, and then it disappears into thin air. -- Isabel Allende
Love is a free contract that begins with a spark and can end the same way. -- Isabel Allende
The first few months of my life of every year are in total retreat. I don't see anybody except my husband and my dog, I don't talk to anybody, and I just write. -- Isabel Allende
Write to register history, and name each thing. Write what should not be forgotten. -- Isabel Allende
purple tongue, and that the whitish hair that -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
A book is not an end in itself; it is only a way to touch someone - a bridge extended across a space of loneliness and obscurity - and sometimes it is a way of winning other people to our causes. -- Isabel Allende
Cooking can be like foreplay. -- Isabel Allende
Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. They only make good former spouses. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
Because he had hardened his soul and silenced his conscience with the excuse of progress -- Isabel Allende
There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It's the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that's why they get noticed. -- Isabel Allende
Apropos of the observatory, -- Isabel Allende
What is the most generous thing to do in this case? -- Isabel Allende
Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions. -- Isabel Allende
The concept that you could possess land was as unfathomable to them as that of dividing up the sea. -- Isabel Allende
My mother is a great artist, but she always treated her paintings like minor postcards. Had she pursued it, she would have been a great artist. Instead, she looked down on her art. -- Isabel Allende
And I am not one of those women who trips twice over the same stone. -- Isabel Allende
Erotica is using a feather; pornograpy is using the whole chicken. -- Isabel Allende
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. -- Isabel Allende
The connection that I have with my readers makes me very happy, and gives meaning to the strange profession of writing -- Isabel Allende
Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process. -- Isabel Allende
Sex is the instrument and love the music ... -- Isabel Allende
You can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction -- Isabel Allende
Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too. -- Isabel Allende
Everyone in his place and a place for everyone. -- Isabel Allende
There are a lot of good people in the world but they keep quiet about it, it's bad ones that make noise a lot if noise and they get noticed. -- Isabel Allende
In the United States, the fact that you can start again gives a lot of energy and strength and youth to this country. That is why it's so powerful in many ways, and so creative. -- Isabel Allende
Her stoic attitude contributed to the air of mystery surrounding her, long before she had any secrets to keep. -- Isabel Allende
My father says that fear is good; it's the body's alarm system, it warns us of danger. But sometimes danger can't be avoided, and then you have to forget about being afraid. -- Isabel Allende
The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night. -- Isabel Allende
Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me. -- Isabel Allende
In her experience, light skin and money made almost anything easier. She wanted her grandchildren to come into the world with an advantage. -- Isabel Allende
Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences. -- Isabel Allende
I'm interested in people who have to overcome obstacles, people who are not sheltered by the umbrella of the establishment, marginals. -- Isabel Allende
The slave who dances is free ... while he is dancing. -- Isabel Allende
epistolary communication: -- Isabel Allende
Inside, I feel good. I feel charming, seductive, sexy. Nobody else sees that. -- Isabel Allende
The calendar is a human invention; time does not exist on the spiritual level. -- 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
I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently. -- Isabel Allende
Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent. -- Isabel Allende
The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seems natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear ... -- 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
I'm an expert. I can kill anybody and not be caught. -- Isabel Allende
More and more books are published every year. If people were not reading them, they wouldn't be published. We are now reading electronic books or whatever else, but people are still reading, and people still need stories. -- Isabel Allende
What is truer than truth? Answer: the story. -- Isabel Allende
After fifty most of the bullshit is gone. -- Isabel Allende
You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found. -- Isabel Allende
Nothing's as dangerous as power with impunity. -- Isabel Allende
I come from the so-called Third World (what is the Second)? -- Isabel Allende
Not only serve the meal, they offer to cut the meat. -- Isabel Allende
