Isabel Movie Quotes

I stopped examining myself in the mirror to compare myself to the perfect beauties of movies and magazines; I decided I was beautiful-- for the simple reason that I wanted to be. And then never gave the matter a second thought. -Eva Luna

Are you a dinner and a movie type girl, or a picnic in the park type girl, or a stay indoors, preferably in the bedroom type girl?

The Things They Carried has sold over two million copies internationally, won numerous awards, and is an English classroom staple. Isabel Allende was the first writer to hold me inside a sentence, rapt and wondrous. It's no surprise that her most transformative writing springs from personal anguish. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather whom she could not reach in time. Eva Luna, one of my favorite novels, is about an orphan girl who uses her storytelling gift to survive and thrive amid trauma, and Allende refers to the healing power of writing in many of her interviews. Allende's books have sold over fifty-six million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and been made into successful plays and movies. Such is the power of mining your deep. Jeanette Winterson acknowledges that her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her own story of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household in the 1950s. She wrote it to create psychic space from the trauma. In her memoir, she writes of Oranges, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” Sherman Alexie, who grew up in poverty on an Indian reservation that as a child he never dreamed he could leave, does something similar in his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, named one of the “Best Books of 2007” by School Library Journal. He has said that fictionalizing life is so satisfying because he can spin the story better than real life did. Nora Ephron's roman à clef Heartburn is a sharply funny, fictionalized account of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She couldn't control his cheating during her pregnancy or the subsequent dissolution of their marriage, but through the novelization of her experience, she got to revise the ending of that particular story. In Heartburn, Rachel, the character based on Ephron, is asked

You need to get a hobby. Preferably something that keeps you too busy to talk.” “Oh, I have that. His name is Wilhelm.” “Making out in the movie theater isn’t a hobby.” “I disagree. Plus, the people who called it French kissing apparently never made out with a German.

The woman at the other end of the room stood unmoving, her posture a slender question mark, silhouetted against the light from the window. She had large dark eyes surrounded by thick lashes that appeared damp from crying. Her sable-brown hair was looped into a careless braid down her back, and she wore a gauzy skirt and blouse, an apron, a pair of oven mitts and espadrilles tied at the ankles. The two of them stared at one another. The stranger shifted, stepping into a shaft of light through the open window. She had the face of an old Hollywood movie star, with an aquiline nose and full lips. She wore little or no makeup; her olive-toned skin gave her an air of unstudied elegance, needing no embellishment.

How to describe the way an attitude can alter a face, the features of which could belong as easily to a librarian or a mild-mannered shoe salesperson, but which, infused by anger or fury, could double for a horror-movie villain?

The Caribbean is still an exciting destination. I have been to just about every notable island surrounding this sea and have yet to be bored. Some of the islands are administered by other countries like Saint Martín; some are independent countries such as Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The languages differ from island to island and include English, French, Spanish, Dutch Haitian Creole and Papiamento although English is understood on most islands. This time I returned to the Dominican Republic, an island nation that I first visited when Santo Domingo was called Ciudad Trujillo in 1955 and have returned numerous times. I have also been to Haiti the country that shares the Island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic and I have stood at the mountainous border dividing the two countries. Driving around the country offers magnificent views with every turn in the road. On this visit I enjoyed the northern Atlantic coast named the Amber Coast because of the amount of amber found there. The primary site along the northern coast is La Cordillera Septentrional. The amber-bearing stones named clastic rocks are usually washed down the steep inclines along with sandstone and other debris and are even found in deep water at the end of the run. The Amber Coast of the Dominican Republic has mostly low mountains and beautiful beaches. Overlooking the city of Puerto Plata is Mount Isabel de Torres, which is covered by dense jungles but can be ascended by a cableway. Some of these jungle areas were used as sites for the movie Jurassic Park. A new 30 acre tourist port for Carnival Cruise Lines has been constructed in Amber Cove at a cost of $85 Million. It is one of the newest destinations to visit in the Caribbean and well worth the effort.

Flowers are reminders of the great outdoors, of movies and romance. They cheer you up—they are pleasures. They make me feel like I have my act together, that I won’t fall off the edge. Flowers aren’t only for you, but also for others—they bring happiness so easily.