Isabel Allende Quotes

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)

I spend ten, twelve hours a day alone in a room writing. I don't talk to anybody. I don't answer the telephone. I'm just a medium or an instrument of something that is happening beyond me, voices that talk through me. I'm creating a world that is fiction but that doesn't belong to me. I'm not God; I'm just an instrument. And in that long, very patient daily exercise of writing I have discovered a lot about myself and about life. I have learned. I'm not conscious of what I'm writing. It’s a strange process—as if by this lying-in-fiction you discover little things that are true about yourself, about life, about people, about how the world works.

Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of unknown things. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality

We see stuff on TV that doesn’t look real. It looks like a video game. We don’t see the collateral damage.

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.

I do believe in destiny. I believe that we are dealt a hand of cards and we have to play the game of life as best we can. And often the cards are marked.

ما يُنسى يبدو كأنّه لم يحدُث قط .

No existe luz sin sombra, tal como no existe dicha sin dolor.

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.

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.

"كل واحد يختار درجة اللون كي يحكي قصّته الخاصة؛ و بودّي أن اختار الوضوح الدائم لصورة مطبوعة بالبلاتين .. لكن ما من شيء في قدري يملك هذه الخاصّية المضيئة ؛أعيش بين صبغات باهتة وألغاز مخفيّة و عدم يقين .. واللون المناسب لرواية حياتي ينطبق أكثر مع لون صورة حائلة صورة "بالسبيا" ."

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

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.

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.

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.