Isabel Allende Quotes

la edad, por sí sola, no hace a nadie mejor ni más sabio, sólo acentúa lo que cada uno ha sido siempre.

¿Qué nos pasó? Tal vez estamos en el mundo para buscar el amor, encontrarlo y perderlo, una y otra vez. Con cada amor volvemos a nacer, y con cada amor que termina se nos abre una herida... Estoy llena de cicatrices.

La realidad no es solo como se percibe en la superficie, también tiene una dimensión mágica y, si a uno se le antoja, es legítimo exagerarla y ponerle color para que el tránsito por esta vida no resulte tan aburrido.

you will find elements of magic realism in literature from all over the world—not just in Latin America. You will find it in Scandinavian sagas, in African poetry, in Indian literature written in English, in American literature written by ethnic minorities. Writers like Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, and Alice Hoffman all use this style.

Where does taste end and smell begin?

It bothers them that instead of taking on the role of abandoned lover, I have become a happy wife. 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.

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.

Affection must be cultivated, Camilo; it has to be watered and tended like a plant,

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.

Tal ves temía que ese grandioso amor, que había resistido tantas pruebas, no pudiera sobrevivir a la más terrible de todas: la convivencia.

there are more similarities than differences when it comes to gender. Essentially, human beings are very similar, but we are stuck in the differences instead of highlighting the similarities.

Happiness is slippery, it slithers away between your fingers, but problems are something you can hold on to, they’ve got handles, they’re rough and hard

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.

How accommodating love is; it forgives everything. (p10)

Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.