Isabel Allende Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

For women the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time.

Isabel Allende
Humanity has this need to hear stories because they connect us with other people, they teach us about our own feelings. We feel less lonely when we see other people going through the same things, even if they're fictional characters.

Isabel Allende
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.

Isabel Allende
I'm very optimistic because I think that the real strength of a nation like the United States comes from blending cultures. There's no way that you can close the frontiers anywhere. The borders are there to be violated permanently.

Isabel Allende
When a man's earning his living doing things he doesn't like, he feels like a slave; when he's doing what he loves, he feels like a prince.

Isabel Allende
One of the characteristics of North American culture is that you can always start again. You can always move forward, cross a border of a state or a city or a county, and move West, most of the time West. You leave behind guilt, past traditions, memories. You are as if born again, in the sense of the snake: You leave your skin behind and you begin again. For most people in the world, that is totally impossible.

Isabel Allende
Americans have a warrior's mentality, most of them. That's how this society was built. The fact that you own a gun and shoot to defend your life is a very American way of thinking.

Isabel Allende
The fear is not real, Dil Bahadur; it is only in your mind, like all other things. Our thoughts form what we believe to be reality.

Isabel Allende
Fear is like a black cavern that is terrifying. Once you enter the cavern and explore it, you realize that you can get out of it, go through it and get out of it. Then there's another cavern that is just as big and terrifying, and you just go in and dwell in it and see what is the worst that can happen.

Isabel Allende
At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

Isabel Allende
In the United States, the fact that you can start again gives a lot of energy and strength and youth to this country. That is why it's so powerful in many ways, and so creative.

Isabel Allende
Write to register history, and name each thing. Write what should not be forgotten.

Isabel Allende
In Venezuela, when I was living there, crime was growing. You couldn't feel safe anywhere. You couldn't leave your car in the street because it would be stolen. You coun't live in your house if you didn't have a high-security alarm system, because you would be burglarized seven times a week.

Isabel Allende
Heroism is a badly remunerated occupation, and often it leads to an early end, which is why it appeals to fanatics or persons with an unhealthy fascination with death.

Isabel Allende
You spend the first part of your life collecting things... and the second half getting rid of them.

Isabel Allende
My husband, who is a lawyer, is very careful with words and with the truth. He thinks that the truth exists, and it's something that is beyond questioning, which I think is totally absurd. I have several versions of how we met and how wonderful he was and all that. At least twenty. And I'm sure that they are all true. He has one. And I'm positive that it's not true.

Isabel Allende
Fiction happens in the belly, it doesn't happen in the brain.

Isabel Allende
I need to tell a story. It's an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later.

Isabel Allende
Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compresses to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy....

Isabel Allende
He was not oppressed by a crowd because in the midst of all the hullabaloo he always found a quiet place for his soul.

Isabel Allende
Charity, like Socialism, is an invention of the weak to exploit the strong and bring them to their knees.

Isabel Allende
If we don't begin by imagining the perfect society, how shall we create one?

Isabel Allende
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.

Isabel Allende
Someone has said that conversation is sex for the soul.

Isabel Allende
Every person is born with a talent, and happiness depends on discovering that talent in time.

Isabel Allende
There are few virtues a man can possess more erotic than culinary skill.

Isabel Allende
Erotica is using a feather; pornography is using the whole chicken.

Isabel Allende
This is to assuage our conscience, darling" she would explain to Blanca. "But it doesn't help the poor. They don't need chartiy; they need justice.

Isabel Allende
When everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars

Isabel Allende
We are too connected. There's noise in our heads all the time.

Isabel Allende