Quotes by Isabel Allende

الكتابة مثل الشعوذة : لايكفي إخراج أرنب من القبعة ، بل يجب عمل ذلك بأناقة وطريقة ممتعة

Mediante la fotografía y la palabra escrita intento desesperadamente vencer la condición fugaz de mi existencia, atrapar los momentos antes de que se desvanezcan, despejar la confusión de mi pasado.

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

They could not understand the advantage of living contrary to their inclinations in this world in order to enjoy a hypothetical well-being in another.

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 wouldnt sic one on my worst enemy.

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.

At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that 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. ... Thats why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.

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

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.

This was a matter of some small group of guerrillas in some distant caves, a primitive, fanatical, and desperate people who didnt have the resources to intimidate the United States.

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

Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it.

I had a serious library at my disposal, because my Popo believed that culture entered by osmosis and it was better to start early, but my favorite books were fairy tales.

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

I was alone, without a single cent, in an unknown country. If Id learned anything from last years ill-fated adventures, though, it was not to get overwhelmed by minor inconveniences.

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.

I would like to have been born a man, so I could leave too.

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

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

My death..I mean..will it be quick,and with dignity? How will i know when the end is coming?When you vomit blood,sir, Tao Chien said sadly.That happened three weeks later,in the middle of Pacific,in the privacy of the captains cabin. As soon as he could stand , the old seaman cleaned up the traces of his vomit, rinsed out his mouth , changed his bloody shirt, lighted his pipe, and went to the bow of his ship , where he stood and looked for the last time at the stars winking in a sky of black velvet. Several sailors saw him and waited at a distance, caps in hands. When he had smoked the last of his tobacco, Captain John Sommers put his legs over the rail and noiselessly dropped into the sea.-Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende.