Quote by Isabel Allende: “You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do.”

We always have the option of looking away from other people's pain and insulating ourselves from the world's suffering. Allende names this freedom — but the implicit point is that choosing it comes at a moral and human cost to who we become.

Allende published Of Love and Shadows in 1984 and Eva Luna in 1987, novels set against the backdrop of Latin American dictatorships. She was writing from exile in Venezuela, and her work consistently grappled with the question of how ordinary people respond — or fail to respond — to atrocity happening around them.

Chilean-American novelist whose debut novel The House of the Spirits, published in 1982, became a landmark of Latin American magical realism. Her work draws on personal and political history, particularly the 1973 Pinochet coup that forced her into exile.