"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."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Isabel Allende quotes (page 11 of 17)
322 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities."
Read quote
3 likes
"At my age, people prefer to stay in a relationship that is not working. I do not understand that. I think it takes a lot of courage to separate. But it takes more energy to stay in something that is not working."
Read quote
3 likes
"What happens in the world affects me. Sometimes, that's part of the writing."
Read quote
3 likes
"My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left."
Read quote
3 likes
"I was such a sullen, angry, sad kid. I'm sure there are writers who have had happy childhoods, but what are you going to write about? No ghosts, no fear. I'm very happy that I had an unhappy and uncomfortable childhood."
Read quote
3 likes
"He had only to touch me to turn my tears into sighs and my anger to desire. How accomodating love is; it forgives everything."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"Writers speak for those who are kept in silence"
Read quote
3 likes
"That is the best part of writing: finding the hidden treasures, giving sparkle to worn out events, invigorating the tired soul with imagination, creating some kind of truth with many lies."
Read quote
3 likes
"The slave who dances is free ... while he is dancing."
Read quote
3 likes
"After fifty most of the bullshit is gone."
Read quote
3 likes
"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"
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"...a fixation is very stubborn: it burrows into the brain and breaks the heart. There are many fixations, but love is the worst."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"fiction happens in the belly, it doesn't happen in the brain."
Read quote
3 likes