843 Quotes by Isabel Allende

I must not linger on details, daughter, because if we dally, this account may be left unfinished, and no one wants to read hundreds of quartos only to find that the story has no clear ending.

There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It’s the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that’s why they get noticed.

We all have demons in the dark recesses of our soul, but if we bring them out into the light, they grow smaller and weaker, they fall silent and eventually leave us in peace.

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... That’s why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension.

Very few old folk are happy, Irina. Most of them are poor, aren’t healthy, and have no family. It’s the most fragile and difficult stage of life, more so than childhood, because it grows worse day by day, and there is no future other than death.

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

It was an election year and there was reason for concern over the turn of events. The country was waking up. The wave of discontent that was stirring the people was beginning to strike at the heart of that oligarchic society.

An invisible border arose between the parts of the house occupied by Esteban Trueba and those occupied by his wife. In response to Clara’s imagination and the requirements of the moment, the noble, seigniorial architecture began sprouting all sorts of extra little rooms, staircases, turrets, and terraces... the big house on the corner soon came to resemble a labyrinth.

People think that they will sit down and produce the great American novel in one sitting. It doesn’t work that way. This is a very patient and meticulous work, and you have to do it with joy and love for the process, not for the outcome.