The House of the Spirits Quotes

“You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“This is to assuage our conscience, darling" she would explain to Blanca. "But it doesn't help the poor. They don't need charity; they need justice.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“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.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“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.”
― Isabel Allende, La casa de los espíritus

“I was a romantic and sentimental creature, with a tendency towards solitude.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“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”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. ”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“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 . . .”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“Esa noche creí que había perdido para siempre la capacidad de enamorarme, que nunca más podría reírme ni perseguir una ilusión. Pero nunca más es mucho tiempo.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“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.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“No se puede encontrar a quien no quiere ser encontrado”
― Isabel Allende, La casa de los espíritus

“La gente no lee lo que no le interesa y si le interesa es que ya tiene madurez para hacerlo”
― Isabel Allende , The House of the Spirits

“Land is something one should never sell. It is the only thing left when all else is gone.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“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.”
― Isabel Allende, La casa de los espíritus

“-Váyase al carajo
-Bueno, para allá vamos. Usted viene conmigo”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“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.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“The point was not to die, since death came anyway, but to survive, which would be a miracle.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“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.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“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.”
― Isabel Allende, La casa de los espíritus

“Tenía la idea de que al poner nombre a los problemas, estos se materializan y ya no es posible ignorarlos; en cambio, si se mantienen en el limbo de las palabras no dichas, pueden desaparecer solos, con el transcurso del tiempo”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“Tal ves temía que ese grandioso amor, que había resistido tantas pruebas, no pudiera sobrevivir a la más terrible de todas: la convivencia.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“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.”
― Isabel Allende, La casa de los espíritus

“Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of unknown things. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“She had been born to cradle other people's children, wear their hand-me-down clothing, eat their leftovers, live on borrowed happiness and grief, grow old beneath other people's roofs, die one day in her miserable little room in the far courtyard in a bed that did not belong to her, and be buried in a common grave in the public cemetery.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“نظنّ أن هذه الأشياء لا تقع إلا للآخرين . حتى اليوم الذي تقع فيه على رؤوسنا”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“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.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“Barrabas came to us by the sea.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits