Quotes from Isabel Allende

I never try to give a message in my books. It's about living with characters long enough to hear their voices and let them tell me the story. Sometimes I would love to have a happy ending, and it doesn't happen because the character or the story leads me in another direction.

Women are the only ones who will be able to eliminate the patriarchy, and when that happens all of us will win, men as much as women.

There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,' my mother explained shortly before she left me. 'If you can remember me, I will be with you always.

We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.

There is no light without shadow, just as there is no happiness without pain.

You have the health you deserve.

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

I don't think the world will destroy itself in a nuclear cataclysm. On the contrary, we have the capacity to save ourselves and save the planet, and we will use it.

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.

Men's memoirs are about answers; women's memoirs are about questions. Most male authors want to look good in their memoirs and have a place in posterity, while most women know that posterity is what happens when you no longer care. Women want to connect with others here and now; they couldn't care less about legacy!

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.

Give, give, give-what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away?