Isabel Allende Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent.

Isabel Allende
People think that they will sit down and produce the great American novel in one sitting. It doesn't work that way. This is a very patient and meticulous work, and you have to do it with joy and love for the process, not for the outcome.

Isabel Allende
The last time I was in Chile, I was hypnotized by a friend who is studying to be a curandero, a healer, who led me back through several incarnations. It wasn't easy to return to the present, however, since my friend hadn't reached that part of the course, but the experiment was well worth the effort because I discovered that in former lives I was not Genghis Khan, as my mother believes.

Isabel Allende
Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentecostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy.

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

Isabel Allende
A book is not an end in itself; it is only a way to touch someone—a bridge extended across a space of loneliness and obscurity—and sometimes it is a way of winning other people to our causes.

Isabel Allende
Affection is like the noonday sun; it does not need the presence of another to be manifest.

Isabel Allende
Only that, nothing more — a tiny beam of light to show some hidden aspect of reality, to help decipher and understand it and thus to initiate, if possible, a change in the conscience of some readers.

Isabel Allende
Far away from my country I would be like those trees they chop down at Christmastime, those poor rootless pines that last a little while and then die.

Isabel Allende
When you make an omelet, as when you make love, affection counts for more than technique.

Isabel Allende
I felt an unrelenting restlessness. It was the first time I had ever experienced jealousy, and that emotion clung to my skin day and night like a dark stain, a contamination I could not shed; it became so unbearable that when finally I rid myself of it, I was freed forever of the desire to possess another person or the temptation ever to belong to anyone.

Isabel Allende
At my age days dissolve like salt in water; the day's gone and I don't even know what I've done with the hours.

Isabel Allende
If, for example, I saw my grandparents or my daughter for an instant, would I recognize them? Probably not, because in looking so hard for a way to keep them alive, remembering them in the most minimal details, I have been changing them, adorning them with qualities they may not have had. I have given them a destiny much more complex than the ones they lived.

Isabel Allende
We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.

Isabel Allende
My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.

Isabel Allende