Quotes from Isabel Allende

You say you're a coward, but it takes courage to say good-bye to everything and cross a threshold without any idea where it leads.

But beyond confusion and rage, the strongest feeling I remember having that night was frustrated desire, because I would never be able to satisfy my need to run my hands over Rosa's body, to penetrate her secrets, to release the green fountain of her hair and plunge into its deepest waters.

My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left

To love a place you must participate in the community and give back something in return for all you receive. I believe I have done that. There are many things I admire about the United States and others I would like to change, but isn't that always true? A country, like a husband, is always open to improvement.

They're not dead, Lenny. They're more alive now than ever. That's what happens with age: stories from the past come alive and stick to our skin. I'm so pleased we're going to spend the next few years together.

I related my impressions of La Paz, its purple mountains, its hermetic Indians, and its air, so thin that your lungs are always on the verge of filling with foam and your mind with hallucinations.

This is a road I must travel bleeding.

We Chileans like the Germans for their sausage, their beer, and their Prussian helmets, as well as the goose step our military adopted for parades, but in practice we try to emulate the English. We admire them so much that we think we're the English of Latin America, just as we believe that the English are the Chileans of Europe.

They're really good people. Quakers are always to be found where they're most needed.

I was fifteen when I returned to Santiago, disoriented from having lived several years outside the country and from having lost my ties with my old friends and my cousins.

All husbands are boring, John. No woman with an ounce of sense gets married to be entertained, she marries to be maintained.

I fell in love with my country because of the stories my grandfather told me and because of our travels together through the south. He taught me history and geography, showed me maps, made me read Chilean writers, corrected my grammar and handwriting. As a teacher, he was short on patience but long on severity; my errors made him red with anger, but if he was content with my work he would reward me with a wedge of Camembert cheese