Quotes from ALLENDE, Isabel

We learn to live with sadness like a great, lovely companion, because it's a soft sadness that softens the heart and makes you open to everything.

what is not voiced scarcely exists; silence would gradually erase everything, and the memory would fade.

There was no proof that everyone perceived it in the same way; maybe Zulema, Riad Halabí, and others had a different impression of things; maybe they did not see the same colors or hear the same sounds I did. If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation.

His experiences at the scene of so many violent events had not hardened him: he was still vulnerable to the emotions of his adolescence.

I realized that mine is a war with no end in view; I might as well fight it cheerfully or I would spend my life waiting for some distant victory in order to be happy.

He knew by experience that he absorbed everything, that every event was imprinted in his memory, but that sometimes months or years passed before he realized how deeply an episode had marked him. It was as if memory congealed somewhere, then suddenly, through some mechanism of association, appeared before his eyes with blinding intensity.

I suspected that I would reach the end only at my own death, and was fascinated by the idea that I was another character in the story, and that I had the power to determine my fate, or invent a life for myself.

What has to change in this world are attitudes.