Isabel Allende Quotes

Society decides when we get old. But the spirit never ages.

Today's girls are tomorrow's women - and leaders.

I was a very bad journalist. Awful. I would just invent everything. If I did an interview, I had a preconception of what that person should say and I would put my words in his mouth.

Only in romance novels or in thrillers people live outside of a social and political context.

The pain of losing my child was a cleansing experience. I had to throw overboard all excess baggage and keep only what is essential.

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.

Real soup is to the body what peace is to the soul.

I'm surrounded by young people. I'm always now the oldest and the shortest person in the room.

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.

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.

When I fall in love I'm obsessed.

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.

I carry around a little stool to stand on when people want a picture with their cellular phones.

Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.

People are afraid of falling in love because they don't want to suffer.

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.

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

I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason.

Writing is a calling, not a choice.

write with honesty and don't worry about the feelings of others, because no matter what you say, they'll hate you anyway.

But I don't want more things than I need, either.

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.

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.

There is room in the human heart for all the divinities.

I have travelled all over the world and one thing that amazes me is that I can communicate with people. My story may be different but emotionally we are all the same.

I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans.

Be careful what you ask of Heaven; it might be granted.

Everyone in his place and a place for everyone.

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

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.

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

What happens in the world affects me. Sometimes, that's part of the writing.

Dying is not easy. It's a very hard transition.

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

I'm such a control freak. I want to control even my own death. Decide when I will die and how.

When love exists, nothing else matters, not life’s predicaments, not the fury of the years, not a physical winding down or scarcity of opportunity.

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

Everyone is born with some special talent.

You have the health you deserve.

If you change the way you tell your own story, you can change the colour and create a life in technicolour.

I love my dog unconditionally, but never the man I'm sleeping with.

I'm open to love, and I think that I will fall in love with a wonderful man.

The hardest thing of love is to let go.

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

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

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.

After fifty most of the bullshit is gone.

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.

fiction happens in the belly, it doesn't happen in the brain.

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