Isabel Allende > Quotes

“The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.”
― Isabel Allende

“Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende

“The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.”
― Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts

“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

“There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,' my mother explained shortly before she left me. 'If you can remember me, I will be with you always.”
― Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

“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, Of Love and Shadows

“We only have what we give.”
― Isabel Allende

“You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.”
― Isabel Allende, The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir

“A man does what he can; a woman does what a man cannot.”
― Isabel Allende, Inés of My Soul

“Words are not that important when you recognize intentions.”
― Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts

“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, The House of the Spirits

“you can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction”
― 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

“You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not.”
― Isabel Allende

“At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.”
― 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

“Erotica is using a feather; pornograpy is using the whole chicken.”
― Isabel Allende

“We all have an unsuspected reserve of strength inside that emerges when life puts us to the test.”
― Isabel Allende, Island Beneath the Sea

“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

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

“She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

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

“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

“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, Portrait in Sepia

“El pasado y el futuro eran parte de la misma cosa y la realidad del presente era un caleidoscopio de espejos desordenados, donde todo podía ocurrir.”
― Isabel Allende, La casa de los espíritus

“I was a romantic and sentimental creature, with a tendency towards solitude.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“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, Eva Luna