The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.
Biography
About Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende (born 1942) is a Chilean-American author whose sweeping family sagas and magical realist fiction have made her the most widely read female author writing in Spanish. Born in Lima to Chilean parents, she worked as a journalist in Chile until the 1973 coup killed her cousin President Salvador Allende, forcing her into exile in Venezuela. There she began writing a letter to her dying grandfather — which became *The House of the Spirits* (1982), a multigenerational saga that launched her international career.
Her memoir *Paula* (1994), written for her daughter who lay dying in a coma, became one of the most emotionally powerful works in her catalogue. She has published more than 25 books translated into 42 languages and has sold over 77 million copies worldwide. She lives in California.
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- Born
- 1942
- Status
- Living
- Age
- 84 yrs
- Quotes
- 1 collected
Wisdom
Isabel Allende's Famous Quotes
“The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.”
Allende has spoken repeatedly about how her decades of living — through exile, loss, two marriages, a daughter's death, global travel — have made her more aware of complexity rather than less. Certainty, she suggests, is a luxury of the young who have not yet experienced how many exceptions every rule encounters. It is an embrace of epistemic humility as a mark of a fully lived life.
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Isabel Allende (born 1942) is a Chilean-American author whose sweeping family sagas and magical realist fiction have made her the most widely read female author writing in Spanish. Born in Lima to Chilean parents, she worked as a journalist in Chile until the 1973 coup killed her cousin President Salvador Allende, forcing her into exile in Venezuela. There she began writing a letter to her dying grandfather — which became *The House of the Spirits* (1982), a multigenerational saga that launched her international career. Her memoir *Paula* (1994), written for her daughter who lay dying in a coma, became one of the most emotionally powerful works in her catalogue. She has published more than 25 books translated into 42 languages and has sold over 77 million copies worldwide. She lives in California. Isabel Allende lived b. 1942.
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