Isabel Allende

I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.

If this world is going to be a better place for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it will be women who make it so.

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

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

How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?

Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally.

Remember that all the others are more afraid than you

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.

How many times have I told you not to believe everything you hear? Seek truth for yourself.

We all have an unsuspected reserve of strength inside that emerges when life puts us to the test.

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.

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.

And I am not one of those women who trips twice over the same stone.

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.

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.

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.

He realized...that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious.

Erotica is using a feather; pornograpy is using the whole chicken.

...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.