Isabel Allende Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

The biggest straitjacket is all the prejudices that we carry around, and all the fears. But what if we just surrender to the fear? There are things greater than fear. The great, wonderful quality of human beings is that we can overcome even absolute terror, and we do.

Isabel Allende
My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left.

Isabel Allende
The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.

Isabel Allende
That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities.

Isabel Allende
Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story. I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses the luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone of telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia.

Isabel Allende
Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.

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
Many children fly like birds, guess other people's dreams, and speak with ghosts, but... they all outgrow it when they lose their innocence.

Isabel Allende
The things we forget may as well never have happened, but she had many memories, both real and illusory, and that was like living twice.

Isabel Allende
The writer of good will carries a lamp to illuminate the dark corners.

Isabel Allende
Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion.

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

Isabel Allende
We've lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions with meaning.

Isabel Allende
Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.

Isabel Allende
Olga discovered that there are only two kinds of illness: those that are fatal and those that heal themselves in their proper time.

Isabel Allende
How many times have I told you not to believe everything you hear? Seek truth for yourself.

Isabel Allende
Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages.

Isabel Allende
Words are not that important when you recognize intentions.

Isabel Allende
She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying.

Isabel Allende
After a few months without writing, months I've lived turned outward... I fear going deaf, not being able to hear the silence.

Isabel Allende
I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evenesce, to untangle the confusion of my past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing.

Isabel Allende
There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,' my mother explained shortly before she left me. 'If you can remember me, I will be with you always.

Isabel Allende
His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference.

Isabel Allende
You write a book and it's like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You don't know if it will ever reach any shore. And there, you see, sometimes it falls in the hands of the right person.

Isabel Allende
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...

Isabel Allende
The names of persons and living creatures demand respect, because when we speak to them we touch their heart and become a part of their life force.

Isabel Allende
Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.

Isabel Allende
Fiction happens in the womb. It doesn't get processed in the mind until you do the editing.

Isabel Allende
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.

Isabel Allende
She was considered timid and morose. Only in the country, her skin tanned by the sun and her belly full of ripe fruit, running through the fields with Pedro Tercero, was she smiling and happy. Her mother said that that was the real Blanca, and that the other one, the one back in the city, was a Blanca in hibernation.

Isabel Allende