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Isabel Allende
101 quotes
“Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir (2007)
“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 (born 1942) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Zorro (2005)
“Where does taste end and smell begin?”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Language of Flowers" anthologized in The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World edited by Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson (2001)
“Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Paula (1994)
“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 (born 1942) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Of Love and Shadows (1984)
“Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Of Love and Shadows (1984)
“When Irina Bazili began working at Lark House in 2010, she was twenty-three years old but already had few illusions about life. (first line)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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..." (p103)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...you shouldn't stay trapped in the past or be frightened of the future. 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? Every day counts, I can tell you!" (p193)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...We are all born happy. Life gets us dirty along the way, but we can clean it up. 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..." (p194)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Write what should not be forgotten.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p249)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s easy to judge others if you’ve never suffered an experience like that” (p250)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am Inés Suárez, a townswoman of the loyal city of Santiago de Nueva Extremadura in the kingdom of Chile, writing in the year of Our Lord 1580. (first line)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How accommodating love is; it forgives everything. (p10)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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." (p264)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Alexander Cold awakened at dawn, startled by a nightmare. (first line)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With age, you acquire a certain humility...The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything. At your age, you can afford to commit the sin of arrogance, and it doesn't matter much if you look ridiculous" (p50)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jealousy. The person who hasn't felt it cannot know how much it hurts, or imagine the madness committed in its name. (p368)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“love is a free contract that begins with a spark and can end the same way. A thousand dangers threaten love, but if the couple defends it, it can be saved; it can grow like a tree and give shade and fruit, but that happens only when both partners participate. (p369)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p433)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of my writing is an attempt to bring an illusory order to the natural chaos of life, to decode the mysteries of memory, to search for my own identity. I have been doing it for several years, and I have achieved none of the above. My life is as messy as it always has been; my memory still works in mysterious ways-plus I am losing it!-and I still don't have a clear idea of who I really am. Most people would come to the same conclusion. We evolve, change, age. Nobody is carved in stone, except the very pompous or self-righteous.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I wrote my first novel, The House of the Spirits, I had no idea that literature was studied in universities and that people who had never written a book determined the value of others' writing. I simply thought that if a story had the power to touch a few readers, if it planted the seed of new ideas in them, if it seemed true and made a difference in somebody's life, it was valuable. Like most normal human beings, I had never read a book review. Word of mouth was how I chose the books I read.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tell me a story," I say to you. "What about?" "Tell me a story you have never told anyone before. Make it up for me." (last lines of Prologue)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She went by the name of Belisa Crepusculario, not because she had been baptized with that name or given it by her mother, 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. (first lines of "Two Words")”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p22)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p125)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Barrabás came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own. (first lines)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...Captain Longfellow—who, like most Englishmen, was kinder to animals than to people... (p31)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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” (p162)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left.” (p182)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He felt that Christianity, like almost all forms of superstition, made men weaker and more resigned, and that the point was not to await some reward in the sky but to fight for one’s rights on earth. (p255)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Blanca argued that her reading should be monitored because there were certain things that were inappropriate for her age, but 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. (p311)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man and the little girl looked at each other, recognizing themselves in the other’s eyes. (p319)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Public opinion wouldn’t stand for it,” Gómez replied. “This is a democracy. It’s not a dictatorship and it never will be.” “We always think things like that only happen elsewhere,” said Miguel, “until they happen to us too.” (p367)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...and on the date stipulated by law the left calmly came to power. And on that date the right began to stockpile hatred. (p392)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh... (p430)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The coup gave them a chance to put into practice what they had learned in their barracks: blind obedience, the use of arms, and other skills that soldiers can master once they silence the scruples of their hearts. (p436)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Poet’s funeral had turned into the symbolic burial of freedom. (p441)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I told her she had run an enormous risk rescuing me, and she smiled. It was then 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. (p487)”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because she lived under the big umbrella of my grandfather and she didn't have any education - she had three kids, had been abandoned by her husband, had no money - it was a horrible life. The only way she could get attention from her father or anybody else was by being sick. She didn't do it consciously. As a child I felt impotent and guilty because I felt that I couldn't help her in any way.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On her mother’s upbringing in “The undefeated” in The Guardian (2017 Apr 28)
“Thank God – because what are you going to write about if you don’t struggle as a child? I don’t think that you become creative because you have struggled, no, but creative people are fuelled by anger and passion, and haunted by demons and memories.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On how her miserable childhood may have inadvertently affected her writing in “The incredible life of Isabel Allende” in The Telegraph (2014 Jan 28)
“It would have been much better if I had started [writing novels] at 19. But I couldn't. I had to support a family, I wasn't ready. And I think I needed to lose my country to start writing, because The House of the Spirits is an attempt to recreate the country I had lost, the family I had lost.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On her novel The House of Spirits in “The undefeated” in The Guardian (2017 Apr 28)
“The theme of displacement is very natural for me. It always comes up in my books because I have been a foreigner all my life and I don’t feel I belong anywhere. I’m an immigrant.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On how her sense of self remains tied to her native country in “Isabel Allende: 'Few couples survive the death of one child, let alone three'” in The Guardian (2015 Dec 2)
“I imagined the structure of the novel like a braid. My job was to blend three strands evenly and neatly. Each piece of the braid represented one of the stories. The characters were very different but they had something in common: they were emotionally wounded by events of their past.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On her work In the Midst of Winter in “INTERVIEWS: Isabel Allende” in BookPage (2017 Oct 31)
“I never try to give a message in my fiction. When I see that an author is trying to preach to me in a novel, I feel insulted. If I find a message, it should come between the lines; I will discover it if it resonates with me. The ideas, feelings and experiences of the author appear unavoidably in the writing.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On her In the Midst of Winter exemplifies feminism in “INTERVIEWS: Isabel Allende” in BookPage (2017 Oct 31)
“I can only write fiction in Spanish, because it is for me a very organic process that I can only do in my native language.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody has a story and all stories are interesting if they are told in the right tone.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People are complex and complicated—they seldom show all the aspects of their personalities. Characters should be that way too.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To me a short story is like an arrow; it has to have the right direction from the beginning and you have to know exactly where you're aiming.”
Isabel Allende (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source