Top 384 Quotes & Sayings by Isabel Allende

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Chilean writer Isabel Allende.

Last updated on September 16, 2024.

Isabel Angélica Allende Llona is a Chilean writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the genre magical realism, is known for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts, which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize. President Barack Obama awarded her the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Chilean - Writer | Born: August 2, 1942

Source: Wikipedia

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

Before the military coup in Chile, we had the idea that military coups happen in Banana Republics, somewhere in Central America. It would never happen in Chile. Chile was such a solid democracy. And when it happened, it had brutal characteristics.

Isabel Allende

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

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

Isabel Allende

I never said I wanted a 'happy' life but an interesting one. From separation and loss, I have learned a lot. I have become strong and resilient, as is the case of almost every human being exposed to life and to the world. We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward.

Isabel Allende

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

Isabel Allende

Feminism is not dead, by no means. It has evolved. If you don't like the term, change it, for Goddess' sake. Call it Aphrodite, or Venus, or bimbo, or whatever you want; the name doesn't matter, as long as we understand what it is about, and we support it.

Isabel Allende

We want a world where life is preserved, and the quality of life is enriched for everybody, not only for the privileged.

Isabel Allende

I confess that I am a messy, disorganized and impatient reader: if the book doesn't grab me in the first 40 pages, I abandon it. I have piles of half-read books waiting for me to get acute hepatitis or some other serious condition that would force me to rest so that I could read more.

Isabel Allende

I was a political refugee living in Venezuela. I had a job that was twelve hours a day, no money. It was a hard time.

Isabel Allende

I'm a writer. In Latin America, they say I'm a Latin-American writer because I also write in Spanish and my books are translated, but I am an American citizen and my books are published here, so I'm also an American writer.

Isabel Allende

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

Writing is a calling, not a choice.

Isabel Allende

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.

Isabel Allende

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.

Isabel Allende

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

Everybody has losses - it's unavoidable in life. Sharing our pain is very healing.

Isabel Allende

Everything I write has to be connected to my life. One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women.

Isabel Allende

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.

Isabel Allende

I am happier when I love than when I am loved. I adore my husband, my son, my grandchildren, my mother, my dog, and frankly, I don't know if they even like me. But who cares? Loving them is my joy.

Isabel Allende

I get up every morning early, when the sky is red, and write for 10 hours.

Isabel Allende

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

Isabel Allende

A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons.

Isabel Allende

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

Isabel Allende

I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the U.S. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family.

Isabel Allende

We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome.

Isabel Allende

I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.

Isabel Allende

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

Isabel Allende

A memoir is an invitation into another person's privacy.

Isabel Allende

I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.

Isabel Allende

I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences.

Isabel Allende

I have not changed; I am still the same girl I was fifty years ago and the same young woman I was in the seventies. I still lust for life, I am still ferociously independent, I still crave justice, and I fall madly in love easily.

Isabel Allende

I have become an American citizen, and I love this country. I think that this country has incredible potential for goodness, an incredible possibility for doing the wrong thing, too.

Isabel Allende

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

Isabel Allende

Heart is what drives us and determines our fate.

Isabel Allende

I try to let go of the intellect and just tell the story. I only read the page I have in front of me on the screen. Then when the whole story is told, I print it, wait a week and read it.

Isabel Allende

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

Eros is very close to death. And both things, in a way, balance each other.

Isabel Allende

I was not supposed to be in any way a liberated person. I was a female born in the '40s in a patriarchal family; I was supposed to marry and make everyone around me happy.

Isabel Allende

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

I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.

Isabel Allende

I have been a woman for 46 years and I only recently realized I can't change it and I like it.

Isabel Allende

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.

Isabel Allende

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

Isabel Allende

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

Isabel Allende

In times of conflict, war, poverty or religious fundamentalism, women and children are the first and most numerous victims. Women need all their courage today.

Isabel Allende

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

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

Isabel Allende

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

I never try to convey a message, I just want to tell a story. Why that story in particular? I have no idea, but I have learned to surrender to the muse. I become obsessed with a theme or with certain stories; they haunt me for years, and finally, I write them.

Isabel Allende

I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.

Isabel Allende

A man who cooks is very sexy. A woman who cooks is not that sexy. Because it's associated in our mind to the domestic cliche of the woman.

Isabel Allende

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

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

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

Isabel Allende

Unfortunately for my family, they have a writer in the family.

Isabel Allende

My life is about ups and downs, great joys and great losses.

Isabel Allende

I was a lousy journalist. I could never be objective. Sometimes I invented the whole story.

Isabel Allende

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

Isabel Allende

Everything that has to do with food is sensuous. In the United States, however, we are eating all the time. We have a problem with obesity. And yet, we don't enjoy food that much.

Isabel Allende

Top 384 Quotes & Sayings by Isabel Allende

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