Isabel Allende

“Los hombres hacen lo que pueden, las mujeres hacen lo que los hombres no pueden.”

“Mi nieto corría delante con los pies para los lados y moviendo los brazos como un pato. Nos acercamos al arroyo, tumultuoso en invierno, donde habíamos esparcido tus cenizas. Lo reconoció al punto.-Paula estaba enferma ayer-dijo; para él todo pasado era ayer.-Sí. Se murió.-¿Quién la mató?-No es como en la televisión, Alejandro, a veces la gente se enferma y se muere, así no más.-Adónde van los muertos?-No sé exactamente.-Ella se fue por allí-dijo señalando el arroyo.-Sus cenizas se fueron en el agua, pero su espíritu vive en este bosque.¿No te parece lindo?-No. Sería mejor que viviera con nosotros-decidió.”

“Mis más trágicos recuerdos se levantaron en furioso oleaje. Creía que después de pasar por la experiencia de perderte ya nada podía afectarme demasiado, pero la mínima posibilidad de que algo semejante le ocurriera al hijo que me quedaba, me volteó. Tenía un peso en el pecho, como una roca aplastándome, que me cortaba la respiración. Me sentía vulnerable, en carne viva, a punto de llorar en cualquier instante. En la noche, cuando todos descansaban, oía un rumor entre las paredes, había quejidos atascados en los umbrales, suspiros en los cuartos desocupados. Era mi propio miedo, supongo. El dolor acumulado en ese largo año de tu agonía estaba agazapado en la casa.”

“Los caballos de mi sueño, que caían y volvían a levantarse me vinieron a la mente, porque me he caído y vuelto a levantar muchas veces en la vida, pero ninguna caída fue tan dura como la de tu muerte.”

“Los años transcurren sigilosos, de puntillas, burlándose en susurros, y de pronto nos asustan en el espejo, nos golpean a mansalva las rodillas o nos clavan una daga en la espalda.”

“La vida no es una foto, en que uno ordena las cosas para que se vean bien y luego fija la imagen para la posteridad; es un proceso sucio, desordenado, rápido, lleno de imprevistos. Lo único seguro es que todo cambia.”

“Memoria selectiva para recordar lo bueno,prudencia lógica para no arruinar el presente, y optimismo desafiante para encarar el futuro.”

“No se puede encontrar a quien no quiere ser encontrado”

“The concept that you could possess land was as unfathomable to them as that of dividing up the sea.”

“Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages”

“My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's. ”

“As soon as the period of mourning for Dona Ester was over and the big house on the corner was finished, Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle were married in a modest ceremony. Esteban gave his wife a set of diamond jewelry, which she thought beautiful. She packed it away in a shoe box and quickly forgot where she had put it. They spent their honeymoon in Italy and two days after they were on the boat. Esteban was as madly in love as an adolescent, despite the fact that the movement of the ship made Clara uncontrollably ill and the tight quarters gave her asthma. Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compress to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy and desired her with unjust intensity considering the wretched state to which she was reduced. On the fourth day at sea, she woke up feeling better and they went out on deck to look at the sea. Seeing her with her wind-reddened nose, and laughing at the slightest provocation, Esteban swore that sooner or later she would come to love him as he needed to be loved, even if it meant he had to resort to extreme measures. He realized that Clara did not belong to him and that if she continued living in her world of apparitions, three-legged chairs that moved of their own volition, and cards that spelled out the future, she probably never would. Clara's impudent and nonchalant sensuality was also not enough for him. He wanted far more than her body; he wanted control over that undefined and luminous material that lay within her and that escaped him even in those moments when she appeared to be dying of pleasure. His hands felt very heavy, his feet very big, his voice very hard, his beard very scratchy, and his habits of rape and whoring very deeply ingrained, but even if he had to turn himself inside out like a glove, he was prepared to do everything in his power to seduce her.”

“You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found.”

“La memoria imprime en blanco y negro, los grises se pierden por el camino.”

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

“Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story. I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses the luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone of telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia.”

“He had only to touch me to turn my tears into sighs and my anger to desire. How accomodating love is; it forgives everything.”

“I write, she wrote, that 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 . . . And now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand [its] existence . . . It would be difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply fill these pages . . .”

“I felt an unrelenting restlessness. It was the first time I had ever experienced jealousy, and that emotion clung to my skin day and night like a dark stain, a contamination I could not shed; it became so unbearable that when finally I rid myself of it, I was freed forever of the desire to possess another person or the temptation ever to belong to anyone.”

“Barrabas came to us by the sea.”

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

“Just as Daniel Balalcazar said, it makes no sense to suffer in advance a misfortune that may never occur.”

“A man does what he can; a woman does what a man cannot.”

“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.”

“Lanzarme con otro libro es tan grave como enamorarme, un impulso alocado que exige dedicación fanática. Con cada uno, como ante un nuevo amor, me pregunto si me alcanzarán las fuerzas para escribirlo y si acaso semejante proyecto vale la pena: hay demasiadas páginas inútiles y demasiados amoríos frustrados.”

“La realidad no es solo como se percibe en la superficie, también tiene una dimensión mágica y, si a uno se le antoja, es legítimo exagerarla y ponerle color para que el tránsito por esta vida no resulte tan aburrido.”

“Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.”

“Escribo, ella escribió, que la memoria es frágil y el transcurso de una vida es muy breve y sucede todo tan deprisa, que no alcanzamos a ver la relación entre los acontecimientos, no podemos medir la consecuencia de los actos, creemos en la ficción del tiempo, en el presente, el pasado y el futuro, pero puede ser también que todo ocurre simultáneamente, como decían las tres hermanas Mora, que eran capaces de ver en el espacio los espíritus de todas las épocas. Por eso mi abuela Clara escribía en sus cuadernos, para ver las cosas en su dimensión real y para burlar a la mala memoria.”

“Sospecho que todo lo ocurrido no es fortuito, sino que corresponde a un destino dibujado antes de mi nacimiento y Esteban García es parte de ese dibujo. Es un trazo tosco y torcido, pero ninguna pincelada es inútil.”

“Trató de volver a vivir ese momento, la tierra roja y húmeda, el intenso olor de los bosques de pinos y eucaliptos, donde el tapiz de las hojas secas se maceraba, después del largo y cálido verano, y donde la luz cobriza del sol se filtraba entre las copas de los árboles. Trató de recordar el frío, el silencio y esa preciosa sensación de ser los dueños de la tierra, de tener veinte años y la vida por delante, de amarse tranquilos, ebrios de olor a bosque y de amor, sin pasado, sin sospechar el futuro, con la única increíble riqueza de ese instante presente, en que se miraban, se olían, se besaban, se exploraban, envueltos en el murmullo del viento entre los árboles y el acantilado, estallando en un fragor de espuma olorosa, y ellos dos, abrazados dentro del mismo poncho como siameses en un mismo pellejo, riéndose y jurando que sería para siempre, convencidos de que eran los únicos en todo el universo en haber descubierto el amor.”

“El pasado y el futuro eran parte de la misma cosa y la realidad del presente era un caleidoscopio de espejos desordenados, donde todo podía ocurrir.”

“Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span...”

“At the most difficult moments of my life, when it seemed that every door was closed to me, the taste of those apricots comes back to comfort me with the notion that abundance is always within reach, if only one knows how to find it.”

“You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not.”

“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.”

“I seek truth and beauty in the transparency of an autumn leaf, in the perfect form of a seashell on the beach, in the curve of a woman's back, in the texture of an ancient tree trunk, but also in the elusive forms of reality.”

“Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars.”

“At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that 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. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.”

“His lifetime was less than a fraction of a second in infinity. Or maybe he did not even exist; maybe human beings, the planets, everything in Creation were a dream...an illusion. He smiled with humility when he remembered...”

“The names of persons and living creatures demand respect, because when we speak to them we touch their heart and become a part of thier life force.”

“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.”

“It is common knowledge that no man that women flock to boasts of his conquests. Those who do, lie.”

“He was not oppressed by a crowd because in the midst of all the hullabaloo he always found a quiet place for his soul. ”

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

“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. ”

“Heroism is a badly remunerated occupation, and often it leads to an early end, which is why it appeals to fanatics or persons with an unhealthy fascination with death. ”

“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.”

“As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing?”

“Happiness is pure kitsch; we come into the world to suffer and learn.”

“It bothers them that instead of taking on the role of abandoned lover, I have become a happy wife. They relish seeing strong women like you and me humiliated. They cannot forgive us that we triumphed where so many others fail...Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is out of balance, in favor of men. That is why they work so hard to mistreat and destroy us.”