Isabel Allende famous quotes

Heart is what drives us and determines our fate.
-- Isabel Allende

#Inspirational #Success #New Year

I don't want to be looking inside my ego, my stuff, my achievements, my me, me, me, me, I hate that stuff. I just want to be out there eh to the last day of my life ah interested in the world, in causes, in helping other people. Um that doesn't mean that I don't have a spiritual practice, that I don't look at my own soul, that I don't prepare myself for the that transition that death is but I cannot sit in meditation to contemplate my navel for the rest of my life. That would be boring for me.
-- Isabel Allende

#Spiritual #Hate #Mean

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

#Fear #Anxiety #Accepting

I don't want posterity, I don't want anybody to remember me in any way. I don't care about that because I'll be dead. I think the spirit will move to some other state.
-- Isabel Allende

#Moving #Thinking #Care

I can promise you that women working together - linked, informed and educated - can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.
-- Isabel Allende

#Promise #Together #Empowering Women

My mum said that as you age you have to smell good and be clean and don't hate anybody because that makes you older. Um I don't agree. I think that of course you have to smell good and be clean but there's much more that you have to do. Don't complain, exercise, be be strong, um work, be creative, be related to the world, have causes, fight for them passionately. I think all those things are important. I I'm not going to give up and just smell good.
-- Isabel Allende

#Strong #Giving Up #Hate

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

#Perfect #Imagination #Society

I'm not above anybody. I'm, I'm not better than anybody. I am made of the same material that everybody else is and if somebody can be a saint, so can I and if somebody can be a torturer, so can I.
-- Isabel Allende

#Saint #Made #Materials

Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.
-- Isabel Allende

#Writing #Muse #Shows

I think I was a feminist before the word was invented.
-- Isabel Allende

#Thinking #Feminist

You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not.
-- Isabel Allende

#Legends #Fame #Storyteller

I had a very rough childhood and not a happy one and by age 15 I was an old person in many ways. I knew that I had to take care of myself, I um and I always did.
-- Isabel Allende

#Childhood #Age #Care

Write what should not be forgotten.
-- Isabel Allende

#Writing #Forgotten #Should

I think that my life changed at 50. Many things happened. Menopause, the end of youth and my daughter died that year after being a whole year in a coma. So I think that I changed and I became an elder at 50.
-- Isabel Allende

#Daughter #Life Changing #Thinking

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

#Mother #Believe #Effort

I would like to be with my husband together sitting somewhere in a lonely place in the woods and take something, maybe some pills or something, a magic potion and die together.
-- Isabel Allende

#Lonely #Husband #Magic

We only have what we give.
-- Isabel Allende

#Helping Others #Compassion #Giving

The hardest thing of love is to let go.
-- Isabel Allende

#Letting Go #Love Is #Hardest

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

#Love #Inspirational #Life

The world is a very unjust, unfair place and we have to live with that. Historically, there is impunity for most crimes.
-- Isabel Allende

#World #Unjust #Crime

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

#Young #Uninformed #Explanation

The most poor and backward areas in the world are those in which women are subjugated and exploited. Improving the situation of the woman improves the family, the community, and by extension the whole country.
-- Isabel Allende

#Country #Community #World

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

#Cabins #Sides #Cold

...a fixation is very stubborn: it burrows into the brain and breaks the heart. There are many fixations, but love is the worst.
-- Isabel Allende

#Heart #Love Is #Brain

Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.
-- Isabel Allende

#Two #Silence #Noise

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

#Love #Angel #Damnation

I am very grateful for the success, because it has given me the freedom to write without pressure, in my own way, and has enabled me to maintain my family and educate my children and grandchildren, as well as to create a Foundation to empower women and girls.
-- Isabel Allende

#Girl #Children #Grateful

...when everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars
-- Isabel Allende

#Stars #Language #Failing

The world starts to exist, for Americans, when we are in conflict with a place. And then all of a sudden, Afghanistan pops up on the TV screen and it becomes a place. And it exists for three weeks and then it disappears into thin air.
-- Isabel Allende

#Air #Three #World

The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.
-- Isabel Allende

#Night #Library #Pages

My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.
-- Isabel Allende

#Memories #Book #Stories

We all have an unsuspected reserve of strength inside that emerges when life puts us to the test.
-- Isabel Allende

#Tests

Everyone has a story, the air is full of stories. The creative process is mysterious, I don't know why it is that suddenly a theme will take hold of me and refuse to leave me in peace until I investigate it and write it.
-- Isabel Allende

#Writing #Air #Creative

For real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world. We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men.
-- Isabel Allende

#Motivation #Real #Inspiration

My books are based on emotions, feelings, relationships. In these areas women are experts, so it's not strange that the main characters of my novels are females.
-- Isabel Allende

#Book #Character #Feelings

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

#Chickens #Feathers

The success occurs in a place outside of me, and doesn't touch me on an intimate level. I live in my own skin, I have not changed greatly, I remain the same woman.
-- Isabel Allende

#Skins #Levels #Intimate

If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving...
-- Isabel Allende

#Writing #Too Much #Persons

In my private circle I am a mother, grandmother, wife, friend, daughter... the success means nothing to my small tribe.
-- Isabel Allende

#Daughter #Mother #Mean

Although women do two-thirds of the world's labor, they own less than one percent of the world's assets.
-- Isabel Allende

#Two #World #Assets

We only appreciate what we have when we lose it.
-- Isabel Allende

#Appreciate

Give, give, give-what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away?
-- Isabel Allende

#Giving #Collaboration #Talent

Women are the only ones who will be able to eliminate the patriarchy, and when that happens all of us will win, men as much as women.
-- Isabel Allende

#Winning #Men #Able

In terrible moments, in moments of revolution, of war or repression, of illness or death, people react with incredible strength.
-- Isabel Allende

#War #People #Revolution

If this world is going to be a better place for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it will be women who make it so.
-- Isabel Allende

#Grandchildren #World #This World

Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks.
-- Isabel Allende

#Book #Character #Heart

Women have always been courageous... They are always fearless when protecting their children and in the last century they have been fearless in the fight for their rights.
-- Isabel Allende

#Inspiring #Children #Women

Give, give, give - what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away? Of having stories if I don't tell them to others? Of having wealth if I don't share it? I don't intend to be cremated with any of it! It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world and with the divine.
-- Isabel Allende

#Learning #Knowledge #Giving

Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.
-- Isabel Allende

#Writing #Worry #Making Love

At the most difficult moments of my life, when it seemed that every door was closed to me, the taste of those apricots comes back to comfort me with the notion that abundance is always within reach, if only one knows how to find it.
-- Isabel Allende

#Doors #Taste #Comfort

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

#Voice #Want #Inability

How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?
-- Isabel Allende

#Peace #War #Voice

Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. They only make good former spouses.
-- Isabel Allende

#Motivation #Nice #Inspiration

Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.
-- Isabel Allende

#Memories #Writing #Journey

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.
-- Isabel Allende

#Gratitude #Children #Unconditional Love

What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.
-- Isabel Allende

#Abuse #Abuse Of Power

Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.
-- Isabel Allende

#Memories #Fiction #Select

Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed.
-- Isabel Allende

#Daughter #Mother #Children

Writing is a constant exercise in longing.
-- Isabel Allende

#Writing #Exercise #Longing

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

#Important #Intention

What is truer than truth? Answer: the story.
-- Isabel Allende

#Stories #Answers

you can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction
-- Isabel Allende

#Lying #Fiction

As my Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry, indelible, but I’m not going to be weighed down by them till I die. What’s done is done; I have to look ahead.
-- Isabel Allende

#Stupid #Dark #Color

I write to understand my circumstances, to sort out the confusion of reality, to exorcise my demons. But most of all, I write because I love it!
-- Isabel Allende

#Writing #Reality #Confusion

I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before.
-- Isabel Allende

#Zero #Past #Support

I don't want an uneventful and safe life, I prefer an adventurous one.
-- Isabel Allende

#Safe #Want #Adventurous

I need to remember to overcome.
-- Isabel Allende

#Overcoming #Needs #Remember

From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there.
-- Isabel Allende

#Writing #Space #Use

I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist - although the term had not reached Chile yet, so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me.
-- Isabel Allende

#Feminist #Catholic #Age

Giving women education, work, the ability to control their own income, inherit and own property, benefits the society. If a woman is empowered, her children and her family will be better off. If families prosper, the village prospers, and eventually so does the whole country.
-- Isabel Allende

#Country #Children #Giving

Sisters: talk to each other, be connected and informed, form women's circles, share your stories, work together, and take risks. Together we are invincible.
-- Isabel Allende

#Circles #Risk #Working Together

I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.
-- Isabel Allende

#Love #Dream #Writing

All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.
-- Isabel Allende

#Loyalty #Writing #Issues

...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

#Memories #Believe #Past

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

#Daughter #Mother #Loss

Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you.
-- Isabel Allende

#Country #Roots #People

If I didn't write my soul would dry up and die.
-- Isabel Allende

#Writing #Soul #Dry

Peace requires everyone to be in the circle - wholeness, inclusion.
-- Isabel Allende

#Circles #Diversity #Inclusion

Empowering women means trusting them.
-- Isabel Allende

#Mean #Empowering #Empowering Women

A man does what he can; a woman does what a man cannot.
-- Isabel Allende

#Women #Men #Doe

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

#Daughter #Destiny #Grandparent