"The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything."
"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night."
"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."
"You can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction."
"We only have what we give."
"Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me."
"Words are not that important when you recognize intentions."
"For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time."
"You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found."
"Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars."
"Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul."
"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."
"He had only to touch me to turn my tears into sighs and my anger to desire. How accomodating love is; it forgives everything."
"Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change."
"A man does what he can; a woman does what a man cannot."
"Erotica is using a feather; pornograpy is using the whole chicken."
"The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seems natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear . . ."
"'This is to assuage our conscience, darling,' she would explain to Blanca. 'But it doesn't help the poor. They don't need chartiy; they need justice.'"
"She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself."
"...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."
"She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying."
"...a fixation is very stubborn: it burrows into the brain and breaks the heart. There are many fixations, but love is the worst."
"My name is Eva, which means 'life,' according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory."
"At the most difficult moments of my life, when it seemed that every door was closed to me, the taste of those apricots comes back to comfort me with the notion that abundance is always within reach, if only one knows how to find it."
"Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process."
"He realized...that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious."
"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."
"Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story. I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses the luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone of telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia."
"We all have an unsuspected reserve of strength inside that emerges when life puts us to the test."
"It bothers them that instead of taking on the role of abandoned lover, I have become a happy wife. They relish seeing strong women like you and me humiliated. They cannot forgive us that we triumphed where so many others fail...Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is out of balance, in favor of men. That is why they work so hard to mistreat and destroy us. But remember that bold women are like cockroaches: step on one and others come running from the corners"
"And I am not one of those women who trips twice over the same stone."
"After a few months without writing, months I've lived turned outward... I fear going deaf, not being able to hear the silence."
"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. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory."
"I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me."
"If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving..."
"The names of persons and living creatures demand respect, because when we speak to them we touch their heart and become a part of thier life force."
"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. "
"Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives."
"My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's."
"I seek truth and beauty in the transparency of an autumn leaf, in the perfect form of a seashell on the beach, in the curve of a woman's back, in the texture of an ancient tree trunk, but also in the elusive forms of reality."
"You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not."
"It is common knowledge that no man that women flock to boasts of his conquests. Those who do, lie."
"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"
"Happiness is pure kitch; we come into the world to suffer and learn."
"She asked herself a thousand times why she had hungered so desperately to belong body and soul to Joaquin Andieta when truth she had never been totally happy in his arms, and could explain it only in terms of first love. She had been ready to fall in love when he came to the house to unload some cargo; the rest was instinct. She had merely obeyed the most powerful and ancient of calls, but it had happened an eternity ago and seven thousand miles away. Who she was then and what she had seen in him she could not say, only that now her heart was far away from there. Not only was she tired of looking for him but deep down she did not want to find him; at the same time, though, she could not go on riddled with doubt. She needed an ending for that phase in order to begin a new love with a clean slate"
"His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference."
"Be careful what you ask of Heaven; it might be granted."
"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 wouldn't sic one on my worst enemy."
"She was considered timid and morose. Only in the country, her skin tanned by the sun and her belly full of ripe fruit, running through the fields with Pedro Tercero, was she smiling and happy. Her mother said that that was the real Blanca, and that the other one, the one back in the city, was a Blanca in hibernation."
"Reading is like looking through several windows which open to an infinite landscape....For me life without reading would be like being in prison, it would be as if my spirit were in a straightjacket; life would be a very dark and narrow place."
"...when everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars"
"'Do you truly believe that life is fair, Senor de la Vega?'<br />
'No, maestro, but I plan to do everything in my power to make it so.'"
"He was not oppressed by a crowd because in the midst of all the hullabaloo he always found a quiet place for his soul. "
"I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evenesce, to untangle the confusion of my past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing."
"Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. They only make good former spouses."
"As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing?"
"His lifetime was less than a fraction of a second in infinity. Or maybe he did not even exist; maybe human beings, the planets, everything in Creation were a dream...an illusion. He smiled with humility when he remembered..."
"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. "
"Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compresses to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy...."
"January 8 has been a lucky day for me. I have started all my books on that day, and all of them have been well received by the readers. I write eight to ten hours a day until I have a first draft, then I can relax a little. I am very disciplined. I write in silence and solitude. I light a candle to call inspiration and the muses, and I surround myself with pictures of the people I love, dead and alive."
"If, for example, I saw my grandparents or my daughter for an instant, would I recognize them? Probably not, because in looking so hard for a way to keep them alive, remembering them in the most minimal details, I have been changing them, adorning them with qualities they may not have had. I have given them a destiny much more complex than the ones they lived."
"The last time I was in Chile, I was hypnotized by a friend who is studying to be a curandero, a healer, who led me back through several incarnations. It wasn't easy to return to the present, however, since my friend hadn't reached that part of the course, but the experiment was well worth the effort because I discovered that in former lives I was not Genghis Khan, as my mother believes."
"I've been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent stories to keep from boring the psychologist."
"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."
"Just as Daniel Balalcazar said, it makes no sense to suffer in advance a misfortune that may never occur."
"There is room in the human heart for all the divinities."
"Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span..."
"His wife...always dressed in mourning for the children who died in infancy and squeezed breathless by the pressure of her corset, her religion, and the husband fate had dealt her."
"The slave who dances is free ... while he is dancing."
"La Lowell wanted nothing; she lived for the day, unfettered, free, fearless; she wasn't afraid of poverty, loneliness, or infirmity. She accepted everything with good grace; for her, life was an entertaining voyage that inevitably led to old age and death. There was no point in accumulating wealth since in the end, she maintained, we all go to the grave in our birthday suit."
"Passionate. Compulsive. Emotional. I find myself laughing and crying like crazy, and angry at the characters because they do things that I don't want them to and sometimes I hate them. They betray me all the time. I started Daughter of Fortune with two characters that I thought were great. This young man who was tormented, he was the devil lover, he was dark and handsome and he goes to find gold and then I couldn't find him again. I looked for him all over California. I couldn't find him. He just betrayed me and disappeared and became like a ghost-faint, blurred. And the Chinese guy who was supposed to appear for a few lines during a trip on a ship started to grow and grow and became the protagonist. That's the wonder of writing, that you don't know what's going to happen. I never work with an outline. I start adding words and ideas. It's like embroidery. I always say that a short story is like an arrow that has one shot and it has to get there and you need direction, precision, speed, the eye, the wrist to do it in one shot, while a novel is like embroidering a tapestry and you do not know the design. You work from the other side and you put threads and colors together, and then one day you turn it over and you see that there is a design and there is something there that you didn't know was there."
"Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences."
"The concept that you could possess land was as unfathomable to them as that of dividing up the sea."
"Like my maestro, Juan Ribero, she believed that photography and painting are not competing arts but basically different: the painter interpets reality, and the camera captures it. In the former everything is fiction, while the second is the sum of the real plus the sensibility of the photographer. Ribero never allowed me sentimental or exhibitionist tricks-none of this arranging objects or models to look like paintings. He was the enemy of artificial compostion; he did not let me manipulate negatives or prints, and in general he scorned effects of spots or diffuse lighting: he wanted the honest and simple image, although clear in the most minute details."
"He knew that her body was his to engage in all the acrobatics he had learned in the books he kept hidden in a corner of his library, but with Clara even the most abominable contortions were like the thrashings of a newborn; it was impossible to spice them up with the salt of evil or the pepper of submission."
"She had been born to cradle other people's children, wear their hand-me-down clothing, eat their leftovers, live on borrowed happiness and grief, grow old beneath other people's roofs, die one day in her miserable little room in the far courtyard in a bed that did not belong to her, and be buried in a common grave in the public cemetery."
"But I don't want more things than I need, either."
"Leanne lighted an oil lamp and they continued until the moment came to receive the baby. 'Erzulie, mother loa, help it be born,' Tete prayed aloud. 'Saint Raymond Nonatus, pay attention, do not let an African saint get ahead of you,' Leanne answered in the same tone, and they both burst out laughing."
"The most savory grape, the one that produces the wines with best texture and aroma, the sweetest and most generous, doesn't grow in rich soil but in stony land; the plant, with a mother's obstinacy, overcomes obstacles to thrust its roots deep into the ground and take advantage of every drop of water. That, my grandmother explained to me, is how flavors are concentrated in the grape."
"I felt an unrelenting restlessness. It was the first time I had ever experienced jealousy, and that emotion clung to my skin day and night like a dark stain, a contamination I could not shed; it became so unbearable that when finally I rid myself of it, I was freed forever of the desire to possess another person or the temptation ever to belong to anyone."
"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 . . . And now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand [its] existence . . . It would be difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply fill these pages . . ."
"Wishes and fears are illusions, Dil Bahadur, not realities. You must practice detachment."
"Affection is like the noonday sun; it does not need the presence of another to be manifest."
"The calendar is a human invention; time does not exist on the spiritual level."
"The fear is not real, Dil Bahadur; it is only in your mind, like all other things. Our thoughts form what we believe to be reality."
Isabel Allende