Isabel Allende Quotes

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.

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.

El mundo es violento y predatorio, regido por la ley implacable de los más fuertes. La selección de la especie no ha servido para que florezca la inteligencia o evolucione el espíritu. A la primera oportunidad nos destrozamos unos a otros como ratas prisioneras en una caja demasiado estrecha.

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

I try to write the first sentence in a state of trance, as if somebody else was writing it through me. That first sentence usually determines the whole book. It’s a door that opens to an unknown territory that I have to explore with my characters. And slowly, as I write, the story seems to unfold itself, in spite of me. It just happens.

She regretted nothing she had shared with her lover, nor was she ashamed of the fires that had changed her life; just the opposite, she felt that they had tempered her, made her strong, given her pride in making decisions and paying the consequences for them.

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.

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 . . .

According to Nadia, who had an astounding gift for languages, words are not that important when you recognize intentions. (p202)

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.

People are complex and complicated—they seldom show all the aspects of their personalities. Characters should be that way too.

Si fuera capaz de exteriorizar mis sentimientos, tal vez sufriría menos, pero se me quedan atorados adentro, como un inmenso bloque de hielo y pueden pasar años antes que el hielo empiece a derretirse.

Writing is like riding a bicycle: you don’t forget how, even if you go for years without doing it.

من لم يعان الجوع ليس له الحق في إطلاق الأحكام

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?