Isabel Allende Quotes

هناك أيام سعيدة وأيام حزينة. وكل شخص هو سيد صمته

Be careful what you ask of Heaven; it might be granted.

There’s a time to live and a time to die. In between there’s time to remember. That is all I’ve done for these past days, silently filling in the missing details to complete this testament — a sentimental legacy, more than a material one.

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.

January 8 has been a lucky day for me. I have started all my books on that day, and all of them have been well received by the readers. I write eight to ten hours a day until I have a first draft, then I can relax a little. I am very disciplined. I write in silence and solitude. I light a candle to call inspiration and the muses, and I surround myself with pictures of the people I love, dead and alive.

You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descent to hell.

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 . . . And now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand [its] existence . . . It would be difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply fill these pages . . .

Sometimes I have these premonitions and I don't forget them, so I will be prepared when they happen.

She treated him with the casual kindness usually reserved for other people's pets.

The role of the United States, not only in Latin America, but in many other places in the world, is unknown by many people in the United States. People here don’t know what the CIA and the American government has done abroad. And we know, because we are the ones who suffered it.

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.

Jealousy. The person who hasn't felt it cannot know how much it hurts, or imagine the madness committed in its name. (p368)

Tenía la ternura torpe de quien nunca ha sido amado y debe improvisar.

You only have what you give. It’s by spending yourself that you become rich.

من لم يعان الجوع ليس له الحق في إطلاق الأحكام