Isabel Allende Quotes

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.

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.

He had only to touch me to turn my tears into sighs and my anger to desire. How accomodating love is; it forgives everything.

She has a fixation on love. Strong trouble. The girl left her window open one clear night and it crawled into her body while she was asleep. There's no spell can cure it.

لا شيء مجاني في هذا العالم، فمقابل هذه التفاهات ستدفع ثمنًا غاليًا جدًا.

La discusión se prolongaba y ambos se perdían en una oratoria confusa que los dejaba agotados, acusándose mutuamente de ser más testarudos que una mula, pero al final se daban las buenas noches con un beso y quedaban ambos con la sensación de que el otro era un ser maravilloso.

She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh

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 never expected that the weird craft of writing would be of any interest to the general public, nor that a writer could become a sort of celebrity and be expected to behave like one. Writing is a very private matter that happens in silence and solitude-an introverted temperament is an asset in this job. Writing takes up an incredible amount of energy and time; there is very little left for anything else. But more and more the publishing industry forces the authors to become public figures and go around talking, reading, signing, and even selling their books. How can one be in the limelight and still write? Books deserve compassion. They are delicate creatures born to be accepted or rejected as a whole; they can't endure dissection under the microscope of the pathologist. Most writers are as vulnerable as their work. If you pin them against the wall and force them to explain the unexplainable, you might break them. I am afraid it's happening to me.

I have a hundred-year-old aunt who aspires to sainthood, and whose only wish has been to go into the convent, but no congregation, not even the Little Sisters of Charity, could tolerate her for more than a few weeks, so the family has had to look after her. Believe me, there is nothing so insufferable as a saint, I wouldn't sic one on my worst enemy.

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

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)

She intended to swallow the world and he lived crushed by reality.

She went by the name of Belisa Crepusculario, not because she'd been born with it or baptized it, 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.

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