Quotes from The House of the Spirits

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

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

“No se puede encontrar a quien no quiere ser encontrado”
― Isabel Allende, quote from The House of the Spirits

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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, quote from The House of the Spirits

“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, quote from The House of the Spirits

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

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

“But why give a man something it's so hard to earn? In that respect women are really thick. They're the daughters of rigidity. They need a man to feel secure but they don't realize that the one thing they should be afraid of is men. They don't know how to run their lives. They have to sacrifice themselves for the sake of someone else. Whores are the worst, patron, believe me. They throw their lives away working for some pimp, smile when he beats them, feel proud when he's well dressed, with his gold teeth and rings on his fingers, and when he goes off and takes up with a woman half their age they forgive him everything because 'he's a man.”
― Isabel Allende, quote from The House of the Spirits

“He knew that her body was his to engage in all the acrobatics he had learned in the books he kept hidden in a corner of his library, but with Clara even the most abominable contortions were like the thrashings of a newborn; it was impossible to spice them up with the salt of evil or the pepper of submission.”
― Isabel Allende, quote from The House of the Spirits

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