155
" He was furious because his sister, even now that she was dead, could still manage to make him feel guilty, just as she had when he was a boy. He recalled his childhood, when she surrounded him with dark solicitude, wrapping him in debts of gratitude so huge that as long as he lived he would never be able to pay them back. Once again he felt the sense of indignity that had frequently tormented him when he was with her. He despised her spirit of sacrifice, her severity, her vocation for poverty, and her unshakable chastity, which he felt as a reproach toward his own egotistical, sensual, power-hungry nature. "
― Isabel Allende , The House of the Spirits
156
" She was one of those stoical, practical women of our country, the kind of woman who has a child with every man who passes through her life and, on top of that, takes in other people’s abandoned children, her own poor relatives, and anybody else who needs a mother, a sister, or an aunt; the kind of woman who’s the pillar of many other lives, who raises her children to grow up and leave her and lets her men leave too, without a word of reproach, because she has more pressing things to worry about. "
― Isabel Allende , The House of the Spirits