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The House of the Spirits
ISABEL ALLENDE
"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"
"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
"She entered without knocking, while he was reading in bed, filling his burrow with the flutter of her long hair and her undulating arms. She touched his books without the slightest reverence, and even dared to take them from their sacred shelves; she blew the dust off their covers without the least respect and tossed them onto the bed, chatting all the while as he trembled with desire and surprise, unable to extract from his whole encyclopedic vocabulary a single word to hold her there, until she finally took leave of him with a kiss on the cheek that continued to burn: a single, terrible kiss on which he built a labyrinth of dreams where the two of them were a prince and princess hopelessly in love.”"
ISABEL ALLENDE
"It was then that I understood that the days of Colonel Garcia and all those like him are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women."
ISABEL ALLENDE
"I am beginning to suspect that nothing that happens is fortuitous, that it all corresponds to a fate laid down before my birth, and that Esteban García is part of the design. He is a crude, twisted live, but no brushstroke is in vain."
ISABEL ALLENDE
"The upper middle class and the economic right, who had favored the coup, were euphoric. At first they were a little shocked when they saw the consequences of their action; they had never lived in a dictatorship and did not know what it was like. They thought the loss of democratic freedoms would be temporary and that it was possible to go without individual or collective rights for a while so long as the regime respected the tenets of free enterprise."