Quotes from Isabel Allende

Memory is fragile and capricious; each of us remembers and forgets according to what is convenient. The past is a notebook with many leaves on which we jot down our lives with ink that changes according to our state of mind.

I tried and tried to sleep, lulled by the movement, the purring of the motor, and the snores of the other passengers, but it's never been easy for me to sleep, and much less now, when I still have residues of the wild life running through my veins.

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

So firm did Nivea's determination become that she wrote in her diary that she would give up marriage in order to devote herself completely to the struggle for women's suffrage. She was not aware that such a sacrifice would not be necessary, and that she would marry a man for love who would back her up in her political goals.

Mothers, on the other hand, are trees with firm roots.

The rural women taught me that courage is contagious and that there's strength in numbers; what you can't do on your own can be achieved together, the more the better.

Her body was growing old, but inside she still kept intact the adolescent she once was.

No one gives you anything in life, Teresa would say, you have to take it by force, and as soon as you get careless they'll take it back.

A slave lacks incentives; for him it is better to work slowly and badly, since his effort benefits only the master, but free people work hard to save and get ahead,, that is their incentive.

The writer and the dreamer have so much in common: They can't control the plot, they are always part of the story or the dream.

To serve an ambassador who was despotic toward his subordinates and servile toward those of a higher social rank.

She owed no one an explanation; if she had made mistakes she had been duly punished by giving up her family, suffering in the hold of the ship, losing her baby, and facing a future of total uncertainty.