Art & Creativity Quote by Isabel Allende

Allende is staking out a literary jurisdiction: the everyday world, but with the lights dimmed just enough for the uncanny to move in. “I’m aware of the mystery around us” reads like a refusal of the modern mandate to explain everything. She’s not claiming supernatural certainty; she’s claiming attentiveness. The verb “aware” matters. It positions mystery as ambient, not exceptional, and it frames her work as a practice of noticing rather than preaching.

The list that follows is doing quiet political work. “Coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams” stitches private experience to narrative authority, elevating forms of knowledge that institutions often dismiss as irrational or “too feminine.” Then she widens the aperture: “the power of nature, magic.” In Allende’s universe, nature isn’t a neutral backdrop; it’s an actor with agency, capable of rearranging human plans. “Magic” here is less wand-waving than a language for forces that colonial rationality, patriarchal realism, and bureaucratic history can’t comfortably file.

Context sharpens the intent. Allende’s fiction emerges from Latin American histories where trauma, exile, and authoritarian violence make straightforward realism feel inadequate or complicit. Magical realism becomes a way to tell the truth slant: to describe how grief reverberates, how memory behaves like weather, how fate and coincidence can feel indistinguishable when life is shaped by powers beyond one person’s control.

The subtext is a manifesto of method: if the world is already strange, the writer’s job isn’t to domesticate it. It’s to give that strangeness a form sturdy enough to carry feeling, history, and survival.