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

Isabel Allende

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Isabel Allende
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: August 2
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of the Kings
Isabel Allende Llona
Born
Death
Two
Nothing
Life
Silences
Unfathomable
Noise
Silence

More quotes by Isabel Allende

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I'm always following the characters and I'm always interested in what happens to them, but what happens to them is conditioned by the circumstances in which they live.
Isabel Allende
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Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed.
Isabel Allende
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I'm surrounded by the scene of aging. I myself am in my 70s and not getting any younger. Although I'm very healthy, and I have a lot of energy, and I still feel 50, I'm over 70 and I understand that I am preparing for later.
Isabel Allende
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I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it.
Isabel Allende
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Writing is a calling, not a choice.
Isabel Allende
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I'm interested in people who have to overcome obstacles, people who are not sheltered by the umbrella of the establishment, marginals.
Isabel Allende
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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.
Isabel Allende
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I'm an expert. I can kill anybody and not be caught.
Isabel Allende
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We don't have an explanation for everything that happens. We don't control almost anything. And if we are not open to that mystery, life becomes so small.
Isabel Allende
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I have a very acute sense of place and time, so all of my stories are rooted in a place and a time.
Isabel Allende
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Fiction happens in the womb. It doesn't get processed in the mind until you do the editing.
Isabel Allende
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The media could do a much better job, that's for sure, especially the media that targets women... Human rights? They couldn't care less!
Isabel Allende
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I need to remember to overcome.
Isabel Allende
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The biggest straitjacket is all the prejudices that we carry around, and all the fears. But what if we just surrender to the fear? There are things greater than fear. The great, wonderful quality of human beings is that we can overcome even absolute terror, and we do.
Isabel Allende
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Youth is not a period in life but a state of mind.
Isabel Allende
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Give, give, give-what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away?
Isabel Allende
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The success occurs in a place outside of me, and doesn't touch me on an intimate level. I live in my own skin, I have not changed greatly, I remain the same woman.
Isabel Allende
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People come from internally, from other places in the United States, but also displaced people from other parts of the world. They come here. If you walk in the streets of San Francisco, you hear all the languages. You smell all the foods. You listen to the music from everywhere. There's great diversity.
Isabel Allende
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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.
Isabel Allende
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That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities.
Isabel Allende