Isabel Allende
Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.Collection: Children
I'm always following the characters and I'm always interested in what happens to them, but what happens to them is conditioned by the circumstances in which they live.Collection: Character
He was not oppressed by a crowd because in the midst of all the hullabaloo he always found a quiet place for his soul.Collection: Soul
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Believe
After a few months without writing, months I've lived turned outward... I fear going deaf, not being able to hear the silence.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Justice
When my daughter Paula died, I was in the deepest pain, and my mother said, "This kind of sorrow is like a long, narrow, dark channel. You have to walk this channel alone and be sure that there is light at the other ending. Just keep walking."Collection: Daughter
The one that came really easy was the Japanese lover, because he's like a ghost in the book. He's always in the background like a spirit, like a shadow, almost. There's a very delicate line there.Collection: Book
She never imagined a scenario in which her love was not returned with the same depth of feeling, for to her it was impossible to believe that a love of such magnitude could have stunned only her. The most elementary logic and justice indicated that somewhere in the city he was suffering the same delicious torment.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Journey
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.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Doors
We've lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions without meaning.Collection: World
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.Collection: Writing
My name is Eva, which means 'life,' according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Memories
In my book tours I get to meet an audience every night. And I see that there are mostly young people, and there are a lot of more men than before, but always young, I don't get older men. As I'm getting older, my audience gets younger!Collection: Book
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.Collection: Saint
She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.Collection: Mother
My female protagonist will not be this promiscuous, beautiful, dark-haired, thin lady. It will be a plump, blond, healer and so forth.Collection: Beautiful
Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentacostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy.Collection: Catholic
When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.Collection: Feminist
No complaining about how hard it is to write, we are all so, so lucky to write, to sit down, inside, and write words on paper. There is no greater freedom, no greater good, nothing that brings more joy.Collection: Writing
Land is something one should never sell. It is the only thing left when all else is goneCollection: Land
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 shores. And there, you see, sometimes it falls in the hands of the right person.Collection: Ocean
He realized...that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious.Collection: Arrogance
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.Collection: Strong
You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found.Collection: Life
How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?Collection: Peace
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 . . .Collection: Voice
Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion.Collection: Passion
Reading is like looking through several windows which open to an infinite landscape....For me life without reading would be like being in prison, it would be as if my spirit were in a straightjacket; life would be a very dark and narrow place.Collection: Reading
Many children fly like birds, guess other people's dreams, and speak with ghosts, but ... they all outgrow it when they lose their innocence.Collection: Dream
Give, give, give-what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away?Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Winning
There is room in the human heart for all the divinities.Collection: Heart
Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.Collection: Memories
As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing?Collection: Memories
Having a point to start is important. You know that when you decide to write something it's like a commitment. It's like falling in love.Collection: Falling In Love
Conceit is a privilege of the ignorant; the wise man is humble because he knows how little he knows.Collection: Wise
Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars.Collection: World
I need to remember to overcome.Collection: Overcoming
How accommodating love is; it forgives everything.Collection: Love Is
With women the best aphrodisiac is words.Collection: Aphrodisiac
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.Collection: Childhood
All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them.Collection: Writing