Isabel Allende Quotes & Sayings

The North Americans' sense of time is very special. They are short on patience. Everything must be quick, including food and sex, which the rest of the world treats ceremoniously. 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. The most popular books are manuals: how to become a millionaire in ten easy lessons, how to lose fifteen pounds a week, how to recover from your divorce, and so on. People always go around looking for shortcuts, and ways to escape anything they consider unpleasant: ugliness, old age, weight, illness, poverty, and failure in any of its aspects. — Isabel Allende

Autumn of the Patriarch, — Isabel Allende

I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently. — Isabel Allende

I'd realized that in writing happiness is useless-without suffering there is no story. — 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

Someone has said that conversation is sex for the soul. — 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

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

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

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

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. — Isabel Allende

With women the best aphrodisiac is words. — 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

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

Hitchhiking and sleeping in cemeteries. (He explained to me that they're very safe, no one goes there at night.) — Isabel Allende

My writing comes not from the happy moments, but from struggle and grief. — Isabel Allende

I'm open to love, and I think that I will fall in love with a wonderful man. — 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

Fourth of July picnic. And by the way, that picnic, like everything else in this land, is a model of efficiency: you drive at top speed, set up in a previously reserved space, spread out the baskets, bolt your food, kick the ball, and rush home to avoid the traffic. In Chile, a similar project would take three days. — 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

She fell in love with freedom. In the Sommers' home she had lived shut up within four walls, in a stagnant atmosphere where time moved in circles and where she could barely glimpse the horizon through distorted windowpanes. She had grown up clad in the impenetrable armor of good manners and conventions, trained from girlhood to please and serve, bound by corset, routines, social norms, and fear. Fear had been her companion: fear of God and his unpredictable justice, of authority, of her adoptive parents, of illness and evil tongues, of anything unknown or different; fear of leaving the protection of her home and facing the dangers outside; fear of her own fragility as a woman, of dishonor and truth. Hers had been a sugar-coated reality built on the unspoken, on courteous silences, well-guarded secrets, order, and discipline. She had aspired to virtue but now she questioned the meaning of the word. — Isabel Allende

You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not. — 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

Of all fragrances, the sweetest is that of virtue. — 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

As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing? — 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

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

The slave who dances is free ... while he is dancing. — 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

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

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

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

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

A novel is like a window, open to an infinite landscape. — 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

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

Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally. — Isabel Allende

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

Eros is very close to death. And both things, in a way, balance each other. — 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

Apropos of the observatory, — 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

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

I carry around a little stool to stand on when people want a picture with their cellular phones. — Isabel Allende

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

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

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

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

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

Words are not that important when you recognize intentions. — 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

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

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

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

It bothers them that instead of taking on the role of abandoned lover, I have become a happy wife. They relish seeing strong women like you and me humiliated. They cannot forgive us that we triumphed where so many others fail ... 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 out of balance, in favor of men. That is why they work so hard to mistreat and destroy us. — 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

All the women and girls she knew, free or not, belonged to a man: father, husband, or Jesus. — Isabel Allende

Writers speak for those who are kept in silence — Isabel Allende

She asked herself a thousand times why she had hungered so desperately to belong body and soul to Joaquin Andieta when truth she had never been totally happy in his arms, and could explain it only in terms of first love. She had been ready to fall in love when he came to the house to unload some cargo; the rest was instinct. She had merely obeyed the most powerful and ancient of calls, but it had happened an eternity ago and seven thousand miles away. Who she was then and what she had seen in him she could not say, only that now her heart was far away from there. Not only was she tired of looking for him but deep down she did not want to find him; at the same time, though, she could not go on riddled with doubt. She needed an ending for that phase in order to begin a new love with a clean slate — 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

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

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

Writing is like riding a bicycle: you don't forget how, even if you go for years without doing it. — 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

Sometimes I have these premonitions and I don't forget them, so I will be prepared when they happen. — Isabel Allende

I'm fine here, Lenny. I'm discovering who I am without all my ornaments and accessories. It's quite a slow process, but a very useful one. Everybody ought to do the same at the end of their life. If I had any self-discipline I would beat my grandson to it and write my own memoirs. I have time, freedom, and silence, the three things I never had amidst all the noise of my earlier life. I'm preparing to die." "That won't — 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 five I was already a feminist, and nobody used the word in Chile yet. — 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 was born in the middle of the Second World War when the United States dropped their atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when millions of people were dying in concentration camps, when half the planet were colonies that belonged to empires. The word feminism didn't exist. And in my lifetime I have seen all these things improved, changed. We are more connected, more informed. We can fight against stuff together in ways we couldn't before. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

It is common knowledge that no man that women flock to boasts of his conquests. Those who do, lie. — Isabel Allende

The writer of good will carries a lamp to illuminate the dark corners. — Isabel Allende

People come from internally, from other places in the United States, but also displaced people from other parts of the world. They come here. If you walk in the streets of San Francisco, you hear all the languages. You smell all the foods. You listen to the music from everywhere. There's great diversity. — Isabel Allende

Know what helps most in misfortune, Irina? To talk. Nobody can go around in this world all alone. Why do you think I set up the pain clinic? Because shared pain is more bearable. The clinic is useful for the patients but is even more useful to me. We all have demons in the dark recesses of our soul, but if we bring them out into the light, they grow smaller and weaker, they fall silent and eventually leave us in peace. Irina tried to free herself from the tentacle-like — 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

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

Cooking can be like foreplay. — 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

Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. They only make good former spouses. — 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

Youth is not a period in life but a state of mind. — 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 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

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

In the books I have written, I have created in my mind a universe. My kids say I have a village in my head and I live in that village, and it's true. When I start writing a book, characters from previous books reappear. All my emotions, my mind, my heart, my dreams, everything becomes connected with a new book, and nothing else really matters. — Isabel Allende