Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Isabel Allende

Quote by Isabel Allende

Work

Mujeres del alma mía: Sobre el amor impaciente, la vida larga y las brujas buenas

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende, born on August 2, 1942, is a renowned Chilean writer known for her magical realism style. Her works have gained widespread popularity, with notable titles including 'Love in the Time of Cholera' and 'The House of the Spirits'. more

You May Also Like

“Whatever your opinion of frequent sexual congress, let us assume for the purpose of this study that sensual sex should provide an increase in personal happiness, which was a widely held belief during the era we are discussing. A visual expression of the data we compiled regarding the subject's sexual activity shows happiness decreasing as sexual activity increases.”

KidsSexWomenRelationshipsFeminismTeenagers
Book:Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning
Create image

“In this hysterical phase, it was, so to speak, the femininity of man which projected itself on to woman and shaped her as an ideal figure in his image. In Romantic love, the aim was not now to conquer the woman, to seduce her, but to create her from the inside, to invent her, in some cases as achieved Utopian vision, as idealized woman , in others as femme fatale, as star - another hysterical, supernatural metaphor. The Romantic Eros can be credited with having invented this ideal of harmony, of loving fusion, this ideal of an almost incestuous form of twin beings — the woman as projective resurrection of the same, who assumes her supernatural form only as ideal of the same, an artefact doomed henceforth to l'amour or, in other words, to a pathos of the ideal resemblance of beings and sexes - a pathetic confusion which substitutes for the dual otherness of seduction. The whole mechanics of the erotic changes meaning, for the erotic attraction which previously arose out of otherness, out of the strangeness of the Other, now finds its stimulus in sameness - in similarity and resemblance. Auto-eroticism, incest? No . Rather a hypostasis of the Same. Of the same eyeing up the other, investing itself in the other, alienating itself in the other - but the other is only ever the ephemeral form of a difference which brings me closer to me. This indeed is why, with Romantic love and all its current spin-offs, sexuality becomes connected with death: it is because it becomes connected with incest and its destiny - even in banalized form (for we are no longer speaking of mythic, tragic incest here; with modern eroticism we are dealing with a secondary incestuous form - of the protection of the same in the image of the other - which amounts to a confusion and corruption of all images). We have here then, in the end, the invention of a femininity which renders woman superfluous. The invention of a difference which is merely a roundabout copulation with its double. And which, at bottom, renders any encounter with otherness impossible (it would be interesting to know whether there was not any hysterical quid pro quo from the feminine in the construction of a virile, phallic mythology; feminism being one such example of the hystericization of the masculine in woman, of the hysterical projection of her masculinity in the exact image of the hysterical projection by man of his femininity into a mythical image of woman).”

FeminismRomanticismHysteriaSameness
Book:Screened Out
Create image

“The particular challenge to those of us who work within the feminist antiviolence movement is to confront and dispel the myths we have created about ourselves as women and as feminists. We need to challenge the notion of women’s shared experiences and accept specificities of women’s experiences in relation to the complex matrix of social institutions, not just the patriarchy. We need to challenge the notion that women do not have real power in this society, and address how all of us are capable of using our various powers and privileges lovingly or abusively. We need to acknowledge the limitation of our feminist consciousness and ethics, and pursue structural remedies to hold ourselves accountable to each other as women and as fellow human beings.”

Feminism
Book:The Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology
Create image