Isabel allende quotes

He realized...that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious.

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.

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.

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.

I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.

Many children fly like birds, guess other people's dreams, and speak with ghosts, but ... they all outgrow it when they lose their innocence.

And I am not one of those women who trips twice over the same stone.

When you make an omelet, as when you make love, affection counts for more than technique.

Those who seek the truth run the risk of finding it.

There is room in the human heart for all the divinities.

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.

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

Be careful what you ask of Heaven; it might be granted.

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

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.

With women the best aphrodisiac is words.

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.

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.

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

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.

A man does what he can; a woman does what a man cannot.

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.

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.

Conceit is a privilege of the ignorant; the wise man is humble because he knows how little he knows.

We only have what we give.

You only have what you give. It’s by spending yourself that you become rich.

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.

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.

We've lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions without meaning.

The hardest thing of love is to let go.

You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descent to hell.

You spend the first part of your life collecting things ... and the second half getting rid of them.

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.

I need to remember to overcome.

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.

What is truer than truth? Answer: the story.

What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.

We want a world where life is preserved, and the quality of life is enriched for everybody, not only for the privileged.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you.

you can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction

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.

I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences.

Real soup is to the body what peace is to the soul.

Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent.

Land is something one should never sell. It is the only thing left when all else is gone

How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?

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.

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

Give, give, give - what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away? Of having stories if I don't tell them to others? Of having wealth if I don't share it? I don't intend to be cremated with any of it! It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world and with the divine.

Every person is born with a talent, and happiness depends on discovering that talent in time.

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.

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

Peace requires everyone to be in the circle - wholeness, inclusion.

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.

...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.

Every time I asked a question, that magnificent teacher, instead of giving the answer, showed me how to find it. She taught me to organise my thoughts, to do research, to read and listen, to seek alternatives, to resolve old problems with new solutions, to argue logically. Above all, she taught me not to believe anything blindly, to doubt, and to question even what seemed irrefutably true, such as man's superiority over woman, or one race or social class over another.

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.

I never said I wanted a 'happy' life but an interesting one. From separation and loss, I have learned a lot. I have become strong and resilient, as is the case of almost every human being exposed to life and to the world. We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward.

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

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.

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.

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

I don't want an uneventful and safe life, I prefer an adventurous one.

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.

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.

Dying is not easy. It's a very hard transition.

Aphrodite is about lust and gluttony - the only two sins worth committing, in my opinion.

Write what should not be forgotten.

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

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

There is no light without shadow, just as there is no happiness without pain.

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.

If this world is going to be a better place for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it will be women who make it so.

She never imagined a scenario in which her love was not returned with the same depth of feeling, for to her it was impossible to believe that a love of such magnitude could have stunned only her. The most elementary logic and justice indicated that somewhere in the city he was suffering the same delicious torment.

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.

We are too connected. There's noise in our heads all the time.

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

In terrible moments, in moments of revolution, of war or repression, of illness or death, people react with incredible strength.

Everyone in his place and a place for everyone.

Although women do two-thirds of the world's labor, they own less than one percent of the world's assets.

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.

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

My name is Eva, which means 'life,' according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory.

...when everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars

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.

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.

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.

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.

My female protagonist will not be this promiscuous, beautiful, dark-haired, thin lady. It will be a plump, blond, healer and so forth.

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.

Erotica is using a feather; pornograpy is using the whole chicken.

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.

Society decides when we get old. But the spirit never ages.

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!

Heart is what drives us and determines our fate.

Love is a free contract that begins with a spark and can end the same way.

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.

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.

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 . . .

How accommodating love is; it forgives everything.

Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion.

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.

Words are not that important when you recognize intentions.

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

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

Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.

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.

True friendship resists time, distance and silence.

Give, give, give-what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away?

Nothing's as dangerous as power with impunity.

Affection is like the noonday sun; it does not need the presence of another to be manifest.

My mum said that as you age you have to smell good and be clean and don't hate anybody because that makes you older. Um I don't agree. I think that of course you have to smell good and be clean but there's much more that you have to do. Don't complain, exercise, be be strong, um work, be creative, be related to the world, have causes, fight for them passionately. I think all those things are important. I I'm not going to give up and just smell good.

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.

if we don't begin by imagining the perfect society, how shall we create one?

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

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.

Sex is the instrument and love the music.

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.

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.

The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.

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