Isabel Allende Quotes

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Isabel Allende

Profession : Writer

Birth : August 2, 1942

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 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

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

Isabel Allende

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

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

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

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

Isabel Allende

If this world is going to be a better place for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it will be women who make it so.

Isabel Allende

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isabel Allende

Every life of a character is within a context. If I write detached from a social and political background, my story looks like a soap opera where everybody is indoors, not working and living off their emotions.

Isabel Allende

Writing is a calling, not a choice.

Isabel Allende