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The House of the Spirits QUOTES

The House of the Spirits QUOTES

1 " You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found. "

― Isabel Allende , The House of the Spirits

2 " 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

3 " لقد عرف كيف يموت ، كما عرف كيف يعيش "

― Isabel Allende , The House of the Spirits

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " …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. "

― Isabel Allende , The House of the Spirits

7 " 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 , The House of the Spirits

8 " 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

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

― Isabel Allende , The House of the Spirits

10 " Aquí la locura se repartió entre todos y no sobró nada para tener nuestro propio loco de remate. "

― Isabel Allende , The House of the Spirits

11 " Scrivo, lei ha scritto, che la memoria è fragile e il corso di una vita è molto breve e tutto avviene così in fretta, che non riusciamo a vedere il rapporto tra gli eventi, non possiamo misurare le conseguenze delle azioni, crediamo nella finzione del tempo, nel presente, nel passato, nel futuro, ma può anche darsi che tutto succeda simultaneamente... "

― Isabel Allende , The House of the Spirits

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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 , The House of the Spirits

15 " Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. "

― Isabel Allende , The House of the Spirits

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " No se puede encontrar a quien no quiere ser encontrado "

― Isabel Allende , The House of the Spirits

19 " I was a romantic and sentimental creature, with a tendency towards solitude. "

― Isabel Allende , The House of the Spirits

20 " 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