Quotes from Isabel Allende

Their most notable defect was that they considered work a virtue, even manual labor. They were materialists, conquerors, and they were infused with a messianic enthusiasm for reforming those who did not think as they did; they did not, however, represent an immediate threat to civilization. No

You are an exceptional man, and it's not just my senility speaking, half the country would agree with me, and the other half doesn't count.

Are you afraid?" asked Alma. "No. I suppose that what comes after death is the same as before birth.

To dismantle the system that sustains civilization is very difficult and takes time, but we are achieving it, bit by bit. The complex and fascinating task of inventing a new order to replace it is long.

I think you'll see that my life story is worthy of a novel, because of my sins more than my virtues.

I was born in 1920, during the influenza pandemic, and I'm going to die in 2020, during the outbreak of coronavirus. What an elegant name for such a terrible scourge.

Occasions for appealing to public compassion are never wanting in a nation eternally rocked by catastrophes that shake the foundations of life, floods that sweep away entire towns, gigantic waves that deposit ships in the center of a plaza. We are created in the idea that life is precarious, and we are always waiting for the next calamity to happen.

Privacy is a luxury of the well-to-do because most Chileans have none. Middle-class families and below live in very close quarters, in many homes several people sleep in the same bed. When there is more than one room, the dividing walls are so thin that every sigh comes right through.

There's a time to live and a time to die. In between there's time to remember.

The national sport is to talk about the person who just left the room. In this, too, we are different from our idols, the English, whose principles forbid them from making personal remarks.

I have lived in a rough sea where waves would lift me and then drop me to the bottom.

Women's creativity is called craft and is sold cheap; when men create, the result is called art and is costly, like Maurizio Cattelan's banana taped to a Miami art gallery wall with a price tag of US$120,000.