Isabel Allende Quotes

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

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

~ Isabel Allende

You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found.

~ Isabel Allende

How many times have I told you not to believe everything you hear? Seek truth for yourself.

~ 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

Sadness and boredom were more bearable than the effort of living a normal life. Perhaps the idea of death began to hover over her during that period, as a kind of higher order of lassitude in which she would not have to move the blood in her veins or the air in her lungs; her repose would be absolute- not to think, not to feel, not to be.

~ Isabel Allende

لقد عرف كيف يموت ، كما عرف كيف يعيش

~ Isabel Allende

Write what should not be forgotten.

~ Isabel Allende

My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.

~ 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

الكتابة مثل الشعوذة : لايكفي إخراج أرنب من القبعة ، بل يجب عمل ذلك بأناقة وطريقة ممتعة

~ Isabel Allende

Mediante la fotografía y la palabra escrita intento desesperadamente vencer la condición fugaz de mi existencia, atrapar los momentos antes de que se desvanezcan, despejar la confusión de mi pasado.

~ Isabel Allende

Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.

~ 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

I have a hundred-year-old aunt who aspires to sainthood, and whose only wish has been to go into the convent, but no congregation, not even the Little Sisters of Charity, could tolerate her for more than a few weeks, so the family has had to look after her. Believe me, there is nothing so insufferable as a saint, I wouldn't sic one on my worst enemy.

~ Isabel Allende

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

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 calendar is a human invention, time does not exist on the spiritual level.

~ Isabel Allende

As my Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry, indelible, but I’m not going to be weighed down by them till I die. What’s done is done; I have to look ahead.

~ Isabel Allende

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

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

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

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

Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.

~ 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

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 can promise you that women working together – linked, informed and educated – can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.

~ 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

How accommodating love is, it forgives everything.

~ 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

…she did not believe that the world was a vale of tears but rather a joke that God had played and that it was idiotic to take it seriously if He himself never had.

~ Isabel Allende

At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

~ Isabel Allende

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

~ Isabel Allende

​Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is badly out of balance, in favor of men.

~ Isabel Allende

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 go, but I always remember you.

~ Isabel Allende

We only have what we give.

~ 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

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

~ Isabel Allende

Until a few months ago we had a code of honor, and even the worst ruffians behaved with decency. You could leave your gold in a tent with no guard and no one would touch it, but now all that has changed. The law of the jungle rules, the only ideology is greed. Don't let yourself be parted from your weapons, and always travel in pairs or groups, because this is a land of thieves.

~ Isabel Allende