Isabel Allende

First cousin once removed of the former Chilean president Salvador Allende. Her father Toms Allende was first cousin of Salvador Allende.

Gave birth to her daughter Paula in 1963 and her son Nicols Frias in 1966.

Sister of Dr. Juan Allende, an associate professor of Political Science at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia and Francisco Allende Llona.

Born to Toms Allende, a diplomatic official, and his wife Francisca Llona Barros, she grew up at her maternal grandparents home after her parents had divorced in 1945.

Her most successful novels include "The House of the Spirits" , which was adapted into The House of the Spirits , "Eva Luna" , "Paula" , "Daughter of Fortune" and "Portrait in Sepia".

Her daughter Paula died at the age of 29 after being in a coma from complications of porphyria (6 December 1992).

Obtained US citizenship.

Resides in San Rafael, California with her second husband Willie Gordon, a lawyer and novelist.

One of the eight women bearing the Olympic flag at the opening ceremony of "Turin 2006: XX Olympic Winter Games" .

Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama 24 November 2014.

Inducted into the Marin [County, California] Womens Hall of Fame in 1994.

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.

Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken.

My erotic Antonio Banderas fantasy: place him naked in a tortilla,slather him with guacamole and eat him.

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.

Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.

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

Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change.

Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change,Sadness and boredom were more bearable than the effort of living a normal life. Perhaps the idea of death began to hover over her during that period, as a kind of higher order of lassitude in which she would not have to move the blood in her veins or the air in her lungs; her repose would be absolute- not to think, not to feel, not to be.

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. . .

لقد عرف كيف يموت ، كما عرف كيف يعيش,Write what should not be forgotten.

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

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.

Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentacostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy.

The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.

As my Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry, indelible, but I’m not going to be weighed down by them till I die. What’s done is done; I have to look ahead.

Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compresses to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy. . . .

Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it.

I had a serious library at my disposal, because my Popo believed that culture entered by osmosis and it was better to start early, but my favorite books were fairy tales.

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

Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are.

I would like to have been born a man, so I could leave too.

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

People do not belong to others, either. How can the huincas buy and sell people if they do not own them. Sometimes the boy went two or three days without speaking a word, surly, and not eating, and when asked what was the matter, the answer was always the same: "There are content days and there are sad days. Each person is a master of his silence.

…she did not believe that the world was a vale of tears but rather a joke that God had played and that it was idiotic to take it seriously if He himself never had.

At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

​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 badly out of balance, in favor of men.

Writing is a calling, not a choice.

I go, but I always remember you.

We only have what we give.

He said that knowledge was of little use without wisdom, and that there was no wisdom without spirituality, and that true spirituality always included service to others. As he explained many times, the essence of a good physician consisted of a capacity for compassion and a sense of the ethical, without which qualities the sacred art of healing degenerated into simple charlatanism.

I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before.

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

I strike the ground with the soles of my feet and life rises up my legs, spreads up my skeleton, takes possession of me, drives away distress and sweetens my memory. The world trembles.

She regretted nothing she had shared with her lover, nor was she ashamed of the fires that had changed her life; just the opposite, she felt that they had tempered her, made her strong, given her pride in making decisions and paying the consequences for them.

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

The Indians’ insistence on clinging to their customs had to be the work of Satan there was no other explanation which is why the friars went out to hunt down and lasso the deserters and then whipped their doctrine of love and forgiveness into them.

Wishes and fears are illusions, Dil Bahadur, not realities. You must practice detachment.

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.

All you will have is the present. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.

Of all fragrances, the sweetest is that of virtue.

He hoped that none of his descendants would get mixed up in politics, which was a trade for butchers and bandits.

He understood then that all his exploits as a reporter, the feats that had won him such recognition and fame, were merely an attempt to keep his most ancient fears at bay, a stratagem for taking refuge behind a lens to test whether reality was more tolerable from that perspective.

The two moments are much alike: birth and death are made of the same fabric.

From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there.

My life is about ups and downs, great joys and great losses.

One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women. I always write about women who are marginalized, who have no means or resources and somehow manage to get out of those situations with incredible strength - and that is more important than anything.

All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.

I get up every morning early, when the sky is red, and write for 10 hours.

Women have always been courageous. . . They are always fearless when protecting their children and in the last century they have been fearless in the fight for their rights.

In times of conflict, war, poverty or religious fundamentalism, women and children are the first and most numerous victims. Women need all their courage today.

I read on my iPad when I travel. I listen to audiobooks in the car. I read books in my bedroom, where I have a comfortable couch, a lamp and two dogs to keep me warm.

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