# The House of the Spirits Tags: #literature ## Metadata * Author: [Isabel Allende](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B01675AB28 * ISBN: B00451W652 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01675AB28 * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28) ## Highlights It was a long night, perhaps the longest in my life. I spent it sitting next to Rosa’s tomb, speaking with her, accompanying her on the first part of her journey to the Hereafter, which is when it’s hardest to detach yourself from earth and you need the love of those who have remained behind, so you can leave with at least the consolation of having planted something in someone else’s heart. — location: [624](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=624) ^ref-28963 --- I had had to weave my love out of memories and cravings that were impossible to satisfy, out of letters that took forever to arrive and arrived faded, and that were incapable of reflecting the intensity of my feelings or the pain of her absence, because I have no gift for letter writing and much less for writing about my own emotions. I told her that those years in the mine were an irremediable loss, and that if I had known she wasn’t long for this world I would have stolen the money that I needed to marry her and built her a palace studded with treasures from the ocean floor—with pearls and coral and walls of nacre. I would have kidnapped her and locked her up, and only I would have had the key. I would have loved her without interruption almost till infinity, for I was convinced that if she had been with me she would never have drunk the poison that was meant for her father and she would have lived a thousand years. I told her of the caresses I’d saved for her, the presents with which I’d planned to surprise her, the ways I would have loved her and made her happy. In short, I told her all the crazy things I never would have said if she could hear me and that I’ve never told a woman since. — location: [633](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=633) ^ref-27696 Why dont we say these things while ppl are alive? --- I soon felt at home in the country. My closest neighbors were a good horse ride away, but I wasn’t interested in having a social life. I enjoyed my solitude, and besides I had a lot of work on my hands. I gradually became a savage. — location: [920](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=920) ^ref-11782 --- The first months, he kept his promise to himself of always bathing and changing his clothes for dinner, as he had heard the British colonizers did in the most distant hamlets of Africa and Asia, so as not to lose their dignity and authority. He would put on his best clothes, shave, and play his favorite opera arias on the gramophone. But little by little he let himself be conquered by rusticity, and came to accept the fact that he had no calling as a dandy, especially since there was no one to appreciate his efforts. — location: [935](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=935) ^ref-8214 --- Still, the exhaustion produced by so much hard work was not enough to suppress his robust and sensual nature. He began to have difficult nights in which the blankets seemed excessively heavy to him, the sheets too light. His horse played nasty tricks on him, suddenly becoming a formidable female, a hard, wild mountain of flesh, on which he rode until his bones ached. The warm, aromatic melons in his orchard looked to him like enormous breasts, and he was astonished to find himself burying his face in his saddle blanket, seeking in the sour smell of his horse’s sweat the forbidden, distant scent of his first prostitutes. During the night, he sweated through nightmares of rotten shellfish, of enormous slabs of raw beef, of blood, semen, and tears. He would wake up tense, with his penis like an iron rod between his legs, angrier than ever. Hoping for relief, he would run out and plunge naked into the icy waters of the river until he couldn’t breathe, but then he would feel invisible hands stroking his legs. Beaten, he would let himself float aimlessly, feeling the hug of the current, the kiss of the tadpoles, the lash of the rushes that grew along the banks. Soon his terrible need became notorious. — location: [941](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=941) ^ref-15111 --- In fact they cared not at all about the war, about scientific inventions, about the advance of industry, the price of gold, or the latest extravaganzas in the world of fashion. These were fairy tales, which did nothing to alter the narrowness of their existence. To that undaunted audience, the news on the radio was remote and alien, and the machine lost all its luster for them when it became evident that it was useless when it came to forecasting the weather. — location: [1032](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=1032) ^ref-21961 --- “Mama,” Esteban murmured, and his voice broke in his chest, exploding into a contained sobbing that erased in a single stroke his sad memories, the rancid smells, frozen mornings, and greasy soup of his impoverished childhood, his invalid mother and absent father, and the rage that had been gnawing at him ever since the day he first learned how to think, so that he forgot everything except those rare, luminous moments in which this unknown woman who now lay before him in her bed had rocked him in her arms, felt his forehead for fever, sung him lullabies, bent over to read the pages of a favorite book with him, had wept with grief to see him leave for work so early in the morning when he was still a boy, wept with joy when he returned at night, had wept, Mother, for me. — location: [1429](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=1429) ^ref-43371 --- He did not know that she had seen her own destiny, that she had summoned him with the power of her thought, and that she had already made up her mind to marry without love. — location: [1501](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=1501) ^ref-38880 --- “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re going to live with us and the two of us will be just like sisters.” — location: [1583](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=1583) ^ref-37855 --- Clara’s impudent and nonchalant sensuality was also not enough for him. He wanted far more than her body; he wanted control over that undefined and luminous material that lay within her and that escaped him even in those moments when she appeared to be dying of pleasure. — location: [1600](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=1600) ^ref-46447 --- Férula abhorred the moment when her brother returned from the country and filled the house with his presence, breaking the harmony they had established while he was away. — location: [1644](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=1644) ^ref-64034 --- Every night, when the married couple retired to their rooms, she was overwhelmed by a peculiar hatred she could not explain, which filled her soul with regret. — location: [1646](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=1646) ^ref-8583 --- “This is to assuage our conscience, darling,” she would explain to Blanca. “But it doesn’t help the poor. They don’t need charity; they need justice.” — location: [2248](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=2248) ^ref-11593 --- Blanca laughed at the story and said it was impossible, because hens are born stupid and weak and foxes are born astute and strong, but Pedro Tercero did not laugh. He spent the whole evening absorbed in thought, ruminating on the story of the fox and the hens, and perhaps that was the night the boy began to become a man. — location: [2319](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=2319) ^ref-9388 --- The hot summers at Tres Marías, where she discovered the strength of a love that grew as she did, — location: [2324](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=2324) ^ref-2101 --- Pedro stared at her with his sad old man’s look and shook his head. He was still much more of a child than she, but he already knew his place in the world. He also knew that he would love this girl as long as he lived, that this dawn would live in his memory, and that it would be the last thing he would see before he died. — location: [2396](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=2396) ^ref-22353 --- Blanca and Pedro Tercero hid in the granary to say their goodbyes. In those three months they had come to love each other with the ecstatic passion that would torment them for the rest of their lives. With time their love became more persistent and invulnerable, but it already had the depth and certainty that characterized it later on. — location: [2411](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=2411) ^ref-49404 --- None of the many children she had raised with so much love attended her funeral. — location: [2665](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=2665) ^ref-22058 --- Clara was tired. She felt alone and confused, and when it came time to make decisions, the only person she could turn to was Pedro Segundo García. That loyal, silent man was always there, within reach of her voice, providing a certain stability in the midst of the catastrophe that had shaken her life. At the end of the afternoon, Clara would often look for him to give him a cup of tea. They sat beneath the eaves in wicker chairs, waiting for night to come and relieve the tension of the day. They watched the darkness fall softly and the first stars begin to twinkle in the sky, listened to the croaking of the frogs, and kept their silence. They had much to say to each other, many problems to resolve, many agreements pending, but they both understood that that half hour spent in silence was a well-deserved reward. They sipped their tea slowly, to make it last, and each thought of the other’s life. They had known each other for more than fifteen years, and had spent their summers in proximity, but in all that time they had exchanged only a handful of sentences. He had seen her as a luminous summer apparition, removed from the brutal demands of the world, different from all other women he had known. Even then, with her hands sunk in the dough or her apron bloody from the chicken to be served at lunch, she struck him as a sort of ghost in the reverberation of the day. Only at dusk, in the calm of those moments shared over a cup of tea, could he see her human side. He had secretly sworn her his loyalty and, like an adolescent, there were times when he fantasized about giving his life for her. He valued her as much as he detested Esteban Trueba. — location: [2702](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=2702) ^ref-21300 --- She looked thinner and paler, with violet rings around her eyes that would have been enough to startle any mother, but Clara quickly understood that her daughter’s illness was not in her body, but in her soul. The hideous gray uniform made her look much younger than she really was, despite the fact that her womanly curves showed through the design. Blanca was surprised to see her mother, whom she remembered as a lighthearted, absentminded angel dressed in white, transformed into an efficient woman with callused hands and two deep lines at the corners of her mouth. — location: [2731](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=2731) ^ref-60513 Noticed a lot in magical realism how the body reflects the soul --- They were her souvenirs of all the del Valle and Trueba children she had cradled in her arms. Under the bed they found a bundle that contained the costumes Nana had used to frighten Clara in her years of silence. Seated on the cot with these treasures in her lap, Clara wept for a long time for this woman who had devoted her entire life to making that of others more agreeable, and who had died alone. — location: [2754](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=2754) ^ref-47826 My heart hurts. Hate the idea of dying alone --- She believed that by giving problems a name they tended to manifest themselves, and then it was impossible to ignore them; whereas if they remained in the limbo of unspoken words, they could disappear by themselves, with the passage of time. — location: [2762](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=2762) ^ref-24226 --- and to inhale the scent of the flowers, which rose in great mouthfuls from the garden, filling every room in the house. He walked up and down the terrace, taking in the expanse of the land around the house, sighing aloud at the thought of that exuberant nature which could assemble, in the most godforsaken country on the planet, mountains and sea, valleys and sky-scraping peaks, rivers of crystalline water, and a peaceful fauna that allowed you to wander tranquilly without having to worry about poisonous snakes or starving beasts. — location: [2990](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=2990) ^ref-51750 --- The wake was attended by peasants from throughout the region, because over the course of his century-long lifetime Pedro García had become related to many of the local farmers. The curandera arrived along with several Indians from her tribe, who began to weep for the deceased when she gave the order, and did not stop until the reveling was over three days later. People gathered outside the old man’s house to drink wine, play the guitar, and keep an eye on the steers that were being roasted. — location: [3101](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=3101) ^ref-16199 --- He woke up late in the morning and devoted an hour or two to the care of his own person. First he would do his exercises and run around the house, oblivious to the taunts of the hardy peasants looking on. Next he would soak himself in a hot bath, and then he would take his time selecting his clothing for every occasion in the day. This last activity was a wasted one, because no one appreciated his elegance and often the only thing he achieved with his British riding outfits, his velvet jackets, and his Tyrolean hats with their little feathers was that Clara, with the best intentions, would offer him clothing more appropriate for the country. — location: [3148](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=3148) ^ref-52228 Goals honestly --- Pedro Segundo drove his mistress and her daughter to the station. After that night he was never again to see them, and he was silent and withdrawn. He helped them to their seats on the train and then stood with his hat in his hand and his eyes lowered, not knowing how to say goodbye. Clara hugged him. At first he was stiff and somewhat taken aback, but his own emotions quickly triumphed and he timidly encircled her with his arms and left an imperceptible kiss on her cheek. They looked at each other through the window for the last time and their eyes filled with tears. The faithful administrator returned to his small brick house, made a bundle of all his personal belongings, wrapped the small amount of money he had managed to accumulate over the years in a handkerchief, and left. Trueba saw him say goodbye to the other tenants and climb up on his horse. He tried to stop him, explaining that what had happened had nothing to do with him, and that it was not right that he should lose his job, his friends, his house, and his security because of his son. “I don’t want to be here when you find my son, patrón,” were the last words Pedro Segundo García spoke before trotting off in the direction of the highway. — location: [3283](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=3283) ^ref-44489 --- In response to Clara’s imagination and the requirements of the moment, the noble, seignorial architecture began sprouting all sorts of extra little rooms, staircases, turrets, and terraces. Each time a new guest arrived, the bricklayers would arrive and build another addition to the house. The big house on the corner soon came to resemble a labyrinth. — location: [3643](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=3643) ^ref-59924 --- As he had so many other times, he begged Blanca to leave the Trueba house, her father’s ferocious guardianship, and the loneliness of her workshop filled with Mongoloids and leisured ladies, and to go with him once and for all to live out the wild love they had been hiding ever since their childhood. But Blanca could not make up her mind. She knew that if she went with Pedro Tercero she would be banished from her social circle and from the position she had always had, and she also realized that she would never be accepted by Pedro Tercero’s friends or be able to adjust to the modest life of a working-class quarter. Years later, when Alba was old enough to analyze this aspect of her mother’s life, she concluded that she had not gone with Pedro Tercero simply because she did not love him enough, for there was nothing in the Trueba house that he could not have given her. — location: [4501](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=4501) ^ref-4297 Sometimes love isnt enough --- “In almost every family there’s a fool or a crazy person,” Clara assured her while she concentrated on her knitting—in all those years she had not learned to knit without looking. “You can’t always see them, because they’re kept out of sight as if they were something to be ashamed of. They’re locked up in the back room so visitors won’t see them. But actually there’s nothing to be ashamed of. They’re God’s creatures too.” “But there’s no one like that in our family, Grandmother,” Alba replied. “No. Here the madness was divided up equally, and there was nothing left over for us to have our own lunatic.” — location: [4535](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=4535) ^ref-17681 House of spirits --- Alba knew that her grandmother was the soul of the big house on the corner. Everybody else learned it later, when Clara died and the house lost its flowers, its nomadic friends, and its playful spirits and entered into an era of decline. — location: [4565](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=4565) ^ref-29977 --- “Mama’s gone,” he said, sobbing. — location: [4703](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=4703) ^ref-64024 Clara ties this book together. Beginning of the end --- I realized that she had simply fulfilled her mission in this life and that she had escaped to another dimension where her spirit, finally free of its material burden, would be more at home. — location: [4714](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=4714) ^ref-55523 What would we say claras mission in life was? --- In the crowd I caught a glimpse of Pedro Segundo García, whom I hadn’t seen in many years. I went to greet him, but he ignored my wave. His head bowed, he walked up to Clara’s grave and threw a spray of half-withered wild flowers on it that looked as if they had been stolen from some garden. He was weeping. — location: [4743](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=4743) ^ref-43267 --- I know she’s forgiven my violent behavior and that she’s closer to me now than she ever was before. She’s still alive, and she’s with me: Clara, the clearest. — location: [4756](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=4756) ^ref-1157 Why forgive him? --- she did not believe that the world was a vale of tears but rather a joke that God had played and that it was idiotic to take it seriously if He himself never had. — location: [4759](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=4759) ^ref-42000 How can we tell she believed this? What would life look like if i believed this --- “You’re a hopeless loser, son,” Trueba would say, sighing. “You have no sense of reality. You’ve never taken stock of how the world really is. You put your faith in utopian values that don’t even exist.” “Helping one’s neighbor is a value that exists.” “No. Charity, like Socialism, is an invention of the weak to exploit the strong and bring them to their knees.” “I don’t believe in your theory of the weak and the strong,” Jaime replied. “That’s the way it is in nature. We live in a jungle.” “Yes, because the people who make up the rules think like you! But it won’t always be that way.” “Oh, yes, it will. Because we always win. We know how to move around in the world and how to use power. Listen to me, son. Pull yourself together and open your own clinic. I’ll help you. But cut out your Socialist nonsense!” Esteban Trueba thundered, with no results. — location: [4791](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=4791) ^ref-20905 Esteban is kinda right that the strong will always know how to use power and exploit the weak, but look at what his strength has cost him he has never really known ove and now he has no one --- Blanca preferred those furtive hotel rendezvous with her lover to the routine of everyday life, the weariness of marriage and the shared poverty at the end of every month, the bad taste in the mouth on waking up, the tedium of Sundays, and the complaints of old age. She was an incurable romantic. — location: [5021](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=5021) ^ref-25747 What could be more romantic than old age --- Perhaps she feared the grandiose love that had stood so many tests would not be able to withstand the most dreadful test of all: living together. — location: [5024](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=5024) ^ref-19055 --- This woman who was so down to earth and practical in all other aspects of life sublimated her childhood passion and lived it tragically. She fed it with fantasies, idealized it, savagely defended it, stripped it of its prosaic truth, and turned it into the kind of love one found in novels. — location: [5034](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=5034) ^ref-16034 --- They stared at each other in silence for several seconds, each thinking that the other was the very incarnation of everything most hateful in the world, but unable to find the old fire of hatred in their hearts. — location: [5811](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=5811) ^ref-43324 --- President — location: [5922](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=5922) ^ref-9425 Interrsting that this man is never named. President, candidate, he is a symbol of all those who were scapegoated and fucked over tho they tried to do their best --- After a few months Blanca realized that she could not hold him prisoner indefinitely and gave up her plans to reduce his spirit in order to make him her permanent lover. She understood that he was being eaten up alive because for him freedom was even more important than love, and that there were no magic pills that would make him change his mind. — location: [6312](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=6312) ^ref-26124 --- “I’ve come to get you out of here,” Trueba said. “Why?” Pedro Tercero asked. “Because Blanca asked me to,” the other answered. “Go to hell,” Pedro Tercero said. “Fine, that’s where we’re going. You’re coming with me.” — location: [6325](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=6325) ^ref-6197 Most men mainly do things for women lol --- They led him to the office of the Nuncio, who was waiting for him dressed in his bishop’s cassock and holding a new safe-conduct pass that would allow him to go abroad with Blanca, who had decided to live out in exile the love she had postponed since her childhood. — location: [6333](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=6333) ^ref-44889 Hope this works out. GlAd shes finally chosen to be happy --- After that the old man turned to Pedro Tercero and looked him in the eye. He stretched out his hand, but he did not know how to shake Pedro’s hand because it was missing several fingers. Instead, he opened his arms and the two men said goodbye in a tight knot, free at last of the hatred and rancor that had poisoned their lives for so many years. “I’ll take good care of your daughter and I will try to make her happy,” Pedro Tercero García said, his voice breaking. “I have no doubt of that. Go in peace, my children,” the old man murmured. He knew he would never see them again. — location: [6340](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=6340) ^ref-62013 --- He enthusiastically embarked on the reconstruction and improvement of Tres Marías, but after that he lost all interest in any other endeavor because he noticed that, thanks to the new economic system, there was no need to work hard and produce, inasmuch as money makes money and his bank accounts grew fatter every day without the slightest effort on his part. Thus, tallying up his accounts, he took a step he had never thought he would take in his life: once a month he sent a check to Pedro Tercero García, who was living with Blanca in exile in Canada, where they both felt completely fulfilled in the peace of satisfied love. — location: [6439](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=6439) ^ref-18999 --- She suggested that she write a testimony that might one day call attention to the terrible secret she was living through, so that the world would know about this horror that was taking place parallel to the peaceful existence of those who did not want to know, who could afford the illusion of a normal life, and of those who could deny that they were on a raft adrift in a sea of sorrow, ignoring, despite all evidence, that only blocks away from their happy world there were others, these others who live or die on the dark side. — location: [6654](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=6654) ^ref-6852 --- 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 line, but no brushstroke is in vain. The day my grandfather tumbled his grandmother, Pancha García, among the rushes of the riverbank, he added another link to the chain of events that had to complete itself. Afterward the grandson of the woman who was raped repeats the gesture with the granddaughter of the rapist, and perhaps forty years from now my grandson will knock García’s granddaughter down among the rushes, and so on down through the centuries in an unending tale of sorrow, blood, and love. — location: [6931](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=6931) ^ref-33902 --- Before I put the puzzle together, it all seemed incomprehensible to me, but I was sure that if I ever managed to complete it, the separate parts would each have meaning and the whole would be harmonious. Each piece has a reason for being the way it is, even Colonel García. — location: [6937](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=6937) ^ref-12665 --- It would be very difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life — location: [6946](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01675AB28&location=6946) ^ref-18531 ---