Eleven Minutes
Paulo Coelho
 

1. But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let’s keep that beginning.

 

2. …moments of dust, thirst and weariness, with the sun beating down, the boy walking fast, and with her trying her hardest to keep up.

 

3. …for, although constantly beset by tragedies, the poor are always hopeful…

 

4. Maria complained to God, but, in the end, she got used to menstruating. She could not, however, get used to the boy’s absence, and kept blaming herself for her own stupidity in running away from the very thing she most wanted.

 

4. At that moment, Maria learned that certain things are lost forever. She learned too that there was a place called “somewhere far away,” that the world was vast and her own town very small, and that, in the end, the most interesting people always leave.

 

4. It began to seem to Maria that the world was too large, that love was something very dangerous…

 

5. But since no one can live on impossible dreams… she soon realized that she needed to take more notice of what was going on around her.

 

5. She also noticed that, as had happened with the first boy, she associated love more with the person’s absence than with their presence: she would miss her boyfriend intensely, would spend hours imagining what they would talk about when they next met, and remembering every second they had spent together, trying to work out what she had done right and what she had done wrong.

 

8. Again he stopped, red-faced, and Maria knew that something was very wrong, but she was afraid to ask what it was. She took his hand, and they walked back to the town together, talking about other things, as if nothing had happened.

 

8. When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. I saw this happen today as the sun went down. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! No herons, no distant music, not even the taste of his lips. How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly?

            Life moves very fast. It rushes us from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.
 

8. After all, it is not enough just to have a great love in your life, you must make sure that everyone knows what a desirable person you are.

 

9. She again pretended that she didn’t care, and survived until the end of the evening talking with her girlfriends about film stars and about other local boys, and pretending not to notice her friends’ occasional pitying looks. When she arrived home, though, she allowed her universe to crumble; she cried all night, suffered for the next eight months and concluded that love clearly wasn’t made for her and that she wasn’t made for love.

 

10. After a while, she began to enter a kind of paradise, the feelings grew intensity, until she noticed that she could no longer see or hear clearly, everything appeared to be tinged with yellow, and then she moaned with pleasure and had her first orgasm.

Orgasm!
It was like floating up to heaven and then parachuting slowly down to earth again. Her body was drenched in sweat, but she felt complete, fulfilled and full of energy.
 

12. …but something always went wrong, and the relationship would end precisely at the moment when she was sure that this was the person with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life. After a long time, she came to the conclusion that men brought only pain, frustration, suffering and a sense of time dragging. One afternoon, watching a mother playing with her two-year-old son, she decided that she could still think about a husband, childrena and a house with a sea-view, but that she would never fall in love again, because love spoiled everything.

 

15. She grew prettier and prettier, and her sad, mysterious air brought her many suitors. She went out with one boy and with another, and she dreamed and suffered—despite her promise to herself never to fall in love again.

 

15. My aim is to understand love. I know how alive I felt when I was in love, and I know that everything I have now, however interesting it might seem, doesn’t really excite me.

            But love is a terrible thing: I’ve seen my girlfriends suffer and I don’t want the same thing to happen to me…
            Although my aim is to understand love, and although I suffer to think of the people to whom I gave my heart, I see that those who touched my heart failed to arouse my body, and that those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart.
 

17. By then, however, Maria knew how to use a man, without being used by him. She never let him touch her, although she was always very coquettish, conscious of the power of her beauty.

 

18. She felt suddenly disappointed with herself; now that she had the chance to do anything she wanted, why was she behaving in this ridiculous manner?

 

24. If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself. If I’m looking for true love, I first have to get the mediocre loves out of my system. The little experience of life I’ve had has taught me that no one owns anything, that everything is an illusion—and that applies to material as well as spiritual things. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever (as has happened often enough to me already) finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them.

            And if nothing belongs to me, then there’s no point of wasting my time looking after things that aren’t mine; it’s best to live as if today were the first (or last) day of my life.
 

27. Up until then, travel and the idea of going far away had just been a dream, and dreaming is very pleasant as long as you are not forced to put your dreams into practice. That way, we avoid all the risks, frustrations and difficulties, and when we are old, we can always blame other people—preferably our parents, our spouses or our children—for our failure to realize our dreams.

 

30. They wanted to know if such things were always happening in Rio de Janeiro, because they had seen similar scenarios in TV soaps. Maria would not be pinned down, wanting to place a high value on her personal experience and thus convince her friends that she was someone special.

 

32. Missed chances. She had learned very early on what that meant. “I love you,” though, were three words she had often heard during her twenty-two years, and it seemed to her that they were now completely devoid of meaning, because they had never turned into anything serious or deep, never translated into a lasting relationship. Maria thanked him for his words, noted them in her memory (one never knows what life may have in store for us, and it’s always good to know where the emergency exit is), gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek and left without so much as a backwards glance.

 

36. I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It’s all a question of how I view my life.

 

39. One day, at some distant future date, I’ll get my ticket home, and I can go to Brazil, marry the owner of the draper’s shop and listen to the malicious comments of those friends who, never having taken any risks themselves, can only see other people’s failures. No, I can’t go back like that. I’d rather throw myself out of the plane as it’s crossing the ocean.

            Since you can’t open the windows in the plane (I had never expected that. What a shame not to be able to breathe in the pure air!), I will die here. But before I die, I want to fight for life. If I can walk on my own, I can go wherever I like.
 

46. I stood for a long time by the roller coaster, and I noticed that most people get on it in search of excitement, but that once it starts, they are terrified and want the cars to stop.

            What do they expect? Having chosen adventure, shouldn’t they be prepared to go the whole way? Or do they think that the intelligent thing to do would be to avoid the ups and downs and spend all their time on a carousel, going round and round on the spot?
            At the moment, I’m far too lonely to think about love, but I have to believe that it will happen, that I will find a job and that I am here because I have chosen this fate. The roller coaster is my life; life is a fast, dizzying game; life is a parachute jump; it’s taking chances, falling over and getting up again; it’s mountaineering; it’s wanting to get to the very top of yourself and to feel angry and dissatisfied when you don’t manage it.
            It isn’t easy being far from my family and from the language in which I can express all my feelings and emotions, but, from now on, whenever I feel depressed, I will remember that funfair. If I had fallen asleep and suddenly woken up on a roller coaster, what would I feel?
            Well, I would feel trapped and sick, terrified of every bend, wanting to get off. However, if I believe that the track is my destiny and that God is in charge of the machine, then the nightmare becomes something thrilling. It becomes exactly what it is, a roller coaster, a safe, reliable toy, which will eventually stop, but, while the journey lasts, I must look at the surrounding landscape and whoop with excitement.
 

49. Although she was capable of writing very wise thoughts, she was quite incapable of following her own advice; her periods of depression became more frequent and the phone still refused to ring.

 

49. “My dear, you’re still very young, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Read. Forget everything you’ve been told about books and just read.”

 

49. In the absence of any television to watch, she accompanied the prince on his journeys, feeling sad whenever the word “love” appeared, for she had forbidden herself to think about the subject at the risk of feeling suicidal.

 

50. And, since life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant, the phone finally rang.

 

51. She dreamed of overcoming all difficulties purely by dint of her own intelligence, charm and willpower.

 

52. Despite her apparent freedom, her life consisted of endless hours spent waiting for a miracle, for true love, for an adventure with the same romantic ending she had seen in films and read about in books. A write once said that it is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone’s mind is love. What nonsense! The person who wrote that clearly knew only one side of the coin.

Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person’s whole life, from one moment to the next. But there was the other side of the coin, the second thing that could make a human being take a totally different course from the one he or she had planned; and that was called despair. Yes, perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly.
 

54. I remember everything, although not the moment when I made the decision…

            I walk about the streets and look at all the people, and I wonder if they chose their lives? Or were they, like me, “chosen” by fate?
            …I don’t feel in the least bit sorry for myself. I am still not a victim, because I could have left that restaurant with my dignity intact and my purse empty. I could have given that man sitting opposite me a lesson in morality or tried to make him see that before him sat a princess who should be wooed not bought. I could have responded in all kinds of ways, but—like most people—I let fate choose which route I should take.
            I’m not the only one, even though my fate may put me outside the law and outside society. In the search for happiness, however, we are all equal: none of us is happy—not the banker/musician, the dentist/writer, the checkout girl/actress, or the housewife/model.
 

57. She decided that, for the first time in many years, she would devote the entire day to thinking about herself. Up until then, she had always been preoccupied with what other people were thinking: her mother, her schoolfriends, her father, the people at the modeling agencies, the French teacher, the waiter, the librarian, complete strangers in the street. In fact, no one was thinking anything, certainly not about her, a poor foreigner, who, if she disappeared tomorrow, wouldn’t even be missed by the police.

 

57. That’s what the world is like: people talk as if they know everything, but if you dare ask a question, they don’t know anything.

 

57. “Or rather, that’s what I used to be like: someone pretending to know everything, hidden away in my own silence, until that Arab guy got on my nerves, and I finally had the courage to say that the only thing I knew was how to tell the difference between two soft drinks. Was he shocked? Did he change his mind about me? Of course not. He must have been amazed at my honesty. Whenever I try to appear more intelligent than I am, I always lose out. Well, enough is enough!”

 

58. The invisible woman at her side said again that things weren’t that simple, but Maria, although glad of this unexpected company, asked her not to interrupt her thoughts, because she needed to make some important decisions.

 

59. …after all, beauty changes as swiftly as the wind…

 

60. Her invisible friend, who had remained silent while she was studying the map, was now trying to reason with her; it wasn’t a question of morality, but of setting off down a road of no return.

Maria said that if she could earn enough money to go back home, then she could earn enough to get out of any situation. Besides, none of the people she passed had actually chosen what they wanted to do. That was just a fact of life.
“We live in a vale of tears,” she said to her invisible friend. “We can have all the dreams we like, but life is hard, implacable, sad. What are you trying to say: that people will condemn me? No one will ever know—this is just one phase of my life.”
With a sad, sweet smile, the invisible friend disappeared.
 

60. She walked across the bridge back to her little room and decided that, however much money and however many future plans she had, she would definitely not buy a television: she needed to think, to use all her time for thinking.

 

61. I have discovered the reason why a man pays for a woman: he wants to be happy.

            He wouldn’t pay a thousand francs just to have an orgasm. He wants to be happy. I do too, everyone does, and yet no one is. What have I got to lose if, for a while, I decide to become a…it’s a difficult world to think or even write…but let’s be blunt…what have I got to lose if I become a prostitute for a while?
            Honor. Dignity. Self-respect. Although, when I think about it, I’ve never had any of those things. I didn’t ask to be born, I’ve never found anyone to love me, I’ve always made the wrong decisions—now I’m letting life decide for me.
 

65. “Look, it’s very simple, you just have to stick to three basic rules. First: never fall in love with anyone you work with or have sex with. Second: don’t believe any promises and always get paid up front. Third: don’t use drugs.”

There was a pause.
“And start now. If you go home tonight without having got your first client, you’ll have second thoughts about it and you won’t have the courage to come back.”
 

69. She wasn’t a victim of fate, she kept telling herself: she was running her own risks, pushing beyond her own limits, experiencing things which, one day, in the silence of her heart, in the tedium of old age, she would remember almost with nostalgia—however absurd that might seem.

 

71. Some people were born to face life alone, and this is neither good nor bad, it is simply life.

 

73. I’m not a body with a soul, I’m a soul that has a visible part called the body. All this week, contrary to what one might expect, I have been more conscious of the presence of this soul than usual. It didn’t say anything to me, didn’t criticize me or feel sorry for me: it merely watched me.

            Today, I realized why this was happening: it’s been such a long time since I thought about love or anything called love. It seems to be running away from me, as if it wasn’t important any more and didn’t feel welcome. But if I don’t think about love, I will be nothing…
            I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write and write about love—otherwise, my soul won’t survive.
 

76. None of them came up with any valid reason, and so she stopped trying to explain her particular Universe.

 

80. When she realized that releasing tension in the soul could be as lucrative as releasing tension in the body, if not more lucrative, she started going to the library again.

 

84. …they are all afraid.

            Afraid of what? I’m the one who should be shaking. I’m the one who leaves the club and goes off to a strange hotel, and I’m not the one with the superior physical strength or the weapons. Men are very strange, and I don’t just mean the ones who come to the Copacabana, but all the men I’ve ever met. They can beat you up, shout at you, threaten you, and yet they’re scared to death of women really. Perhaps not the woman they married, but there’s always one woman who frightens them and forces them to submit to her caprices. Even if it’s their own mother.
 

85. The men she had met since she arrived in Geneva always did everything they could to appear confident, as if they were in perfect control of the world and of their own lives; Maria, however, could see in their eyes that they were afraid of their wife, the feeling of panic that they might not be able to get an erection, that they might not seem manly enough even to the ordinary prostitute whom they were paying for her services. If they went to a shop and didn’t like the shoes they had bought, they would be quite prepared to go back, receipt in hand, and demand a refund. And yet, even though they were paying for some female company, if they didn’t manage to get an erection, they would be too ashamed ever to go back to the same club again because they would assume that all the other women there would know.

“I’m the one who should feel ashamed for being unable to arouse them, but, no, they always blame themselves.”
To avoid such embarrassments, Maria always tried to put men at their ease…
She had to make sure that they didn’t feel ashamed.
 

88. Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings. Like her, these men, and the many others who sought her company, were all tormented by that same destructive feeling, the sense that no one else on the planet cared about them.

 

88. And lastly, there was The Godfather type (named after yet another film), who treated a woman’s body as if it were a piece of merchandise. They were the most genuine; they danced, talked, never gave tips, knew what they were buying and how much it was worth, and never let themselves be taken in by anything the woman of their choice might say. They were the only ones who, in a very subtle way, knew the meaning of the word “Adventure.”

 

89. All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that’s a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly.

            And the person who loves wholeheartedly feels free.
            That is why, regardless of what I might experience, do or learn, nothing makes sense. I hope this time passes quickly, so that I can resume my search for myself—in the form of a man who understands me and does not make me suffer.
            But what am I saying? In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.
            It hurt when I lost each of the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone.
            That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
 

91. Everything had happened so quickly and so slowly, she thought, realizing that time exists in two different dimensions, depending on one’s state of mind…

 

91. …all these months living alone with herself had taught her that there is always a right moment to stop something.

 

94. Maria replied—and as she did so, she created the link that was lacking in the universe.

 

94. “You’ve got a special light about you.”

 

95. As if everything had been ordained by fate, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if she had known this man all her life or had already lived this moment in dreams and now knew what to do in reality… #dejavu

 

97. She studied his clothes, but that didn’t help; life had taught her that the men who took least care of their appearance—as with the painter—always seemed to have more money than the men in suits and ties.

 

99. She finally worked out why she was feeling so uncomfortable: for the first time in many months, someone was looking at her not as an object, not even as a woman, but as something she could not even comprehend; the closest she could come to putting it into words was: “he’s seeing my soul, my fears, my fragility, my inability to deal with a world which I pretend to master, but about which I know nothing.”

Ridiculous, pure fantasy.
“I’d like…”
“Please, don’t talk,” said the man. “I can see your light now.”
…”Your personal light,” he said, realizing that she didn’t know what he was talking about.
 

99. How does light enter a house? Through the open windows. How does light enter a person? Through the open door of love.

 

104. “You have a glow about you. The light that comes from sheer willpower, the light of someone who has made important sacrifices in the name of things she thinks are important. It’s in your eyes—the light is in your eyes.”

 

107. “Other people think I’ve got all the answers, and the less I say, the more intelligent they think I am.”

 

109. She thought:

“What is more important in life? Living or pretending to live? Should I take a risk and say that this has been the loveliest afternoon I’ve spent in all the time I’ve been here? Should I thank him for listening to me without criticism and without comment? Or should I simply don the armor of the woman with willpower, with the ‘special light,’ and leave without saying anything?”
While they were walking along the road to Santiago and while she was listening to herself telling him about her life, she had been a happy woman. She could content herself with that; it was enough of a gift from life.
 

109. There she was with the little boy again, only he wasn’t asking her for a pencil now, just a little company. She looked at her own past, and, for the first time, she forgave herself: it hadn’t been her fault, but the fault of that insecure little boy, who had given up after the first attempt. They were children and that’s how children are—neither she nor the boy had been in the wrong, and that gave her a great sense of relief, made her feel better; she hadn’t betrayed the first opportunity that life had presented her with. We all do the same thing: it’s part of the initiation of every human being in search of his or her other half; these things happen.

 

111. If he was the man she wanted him to be, he would not be intimidated by her silence.

 

111. Today, while we were walking around the lake, along that strange road to Santiago, the man who was with me—a painter, with a life entirely different from mine—threw a pebble into the water. Small circles appeared where the pebble fell, which grew and grew until they touched a duck that happened to be passing and which had nothing to do with the pebble. Instead of being afraid of that unexpected wave, he decided to play with it…

            I could carry on like this, but I could also, like the duck on the lake, have fun and take pleasure in that sudden ripple that set the water rocking.
 

114. And if that is what happens, if I have already lost him, I will at least have gained one very happy day in my life. Considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle.

 

116. He should know that the great aim of every human being is to understand the meaning of total love. Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.

 

118. Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

            No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.
            Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.
            Keeping a passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it—which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?
            I don’t know.
 

121. Only then did she realize that she had spent the last three days waiting for him. And at that moment, she accepted everything that fate had placed in her path.

She didn’t get angry with herself; she was happy, she could allow herself that luxury, because one day she would leave this city; she knew this love was impossible, and yet, expecting nothing, she could nevertheless have everything she still hoped for from that particular stage in her life.
 

122. “At the bottom of the garden is my studio, my soul. Here, amongst all these paintings and books, is my brain, what I think.”

 

124. “Don’t ask me: ‘Why me? What’s so special about me?’ There isn’t anything special about you, at least, nothing I can put my finger on. And yet—and here’s the mystery of life—I can’t think of anything else.”

 

125. He drank a third glass of whisky. Maria accompanied him in her imagination, the alcohol burning his throat and his stomach, entering his bloodstream and filling him with courage, and she too began to feel drunk, even though she hadn’t touched a drop.

 

125. “I want you however you want to be wanted.”

 

127. …she had already discovered the vast universe of fantasies that fills the human soul. But they were all used to their own worlds and none of them had said to her: “take me away from here.” On the contrary, they wanted to take Maria with them.

 
129 “…that passion for destruction is part of how a child discovers the world.
 

129. “I have a lot of pristine train sets in my life too,” said Maria, after a while. “One of them is my heart. And I only played with it when the world set out the tracks, and then it wasn’t always the right moment.”

 

130. “I never understood why I kept that carriage. Now I do: it was in order to give it to you one night before an open fire. Now the house feels lighter.”

 

130. “No, don’t. Wait a week. I’ve learned that waiting is the most difficult bit, and I want to get used to the feeling, knowing that you’re with me, even when you’re not by my side.”

 

132. It was best not to think too much about it all, so as not to spoil it, so as not to let the beauty of what she had just experienced be replaced by anxiety. If that other Maria really existed, she would return when the moment was right.”

 

132. Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone. From that point onwards, things change, the man and the woman come into play, but what happens before—the attraction that brought them together—is impossible to explain. It is untouched desire in its purest state.

When desire is still in this pure state, the man and the woman fall in love with life, they live each moment reverently, consciously, always ready to celebrate the next blessing.
            When people feel like this, they are not in a hurry, they do not precipitate events with unthinking actions. They know that the inevitable will happen, that what is real always finds a way of revealing itself. When the moment comes, they do not hesitate, they do not miss an opportunity, they do not let slip a single magic moment, because they respect the importance of each second.
 

135. In the days that followed, Maria found herself once more caught in the trap she had tried so hard to avoid, but she felt neither sad nor concerned. On the contrary, now that she had nothing to lose, she was free.

 

135. Dreams like theirs never lasted long, and Maria had enough experience of life to know that reality usually chose not to fit in with her dreams. And that was now her great joy: to say to reality that she didn’t need it, that she was no longer dependent on what happened in order to be happy.

 
138: I allowed myself to fall in love for one simple reason: I’m not expecting anything to come of it.
 

138. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I realize that I didn’t go into that café by chance; really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.

            Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meetings are waiting for us, but more often than not, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes direction.
            Everyone knows how to love, because we are all born with that gift. Some people have a natural talent for it, but the majority of us have to re-learn, to remember how to love, and everyone, without exception, needs to burn on the bonfire of past emotions, to relive certain joys and griefs, certain ups and downs, until they can see the connecting thread that exists behind each new encounter; because there is a connecting thread.
 

141. Sometimes life is very mean: a person can spend days, weeks, months and years without feeling anything new. Then, when a door opens—as happened with Maria when she met Ralf Hart—a positive avalanche pours in. One moment, you have nothing, the next, you have more than you can cope with.

 

144. “Pain and suffering don’t normally go with pleasure,” Maria thought. And yet she desperately wanted to believe that they did, and thus make a positive out of her many negative experiences.

 

147. “Today you can ask questions, but the next time, when the theater curtain goes up, the play will begin and cannot be stopped. If it does stop, it is because our souls are incompatible. Remember: it is a play. You must be the person you have never had the courage to be. Gradually, you will discover that you are that person, but until you can see this clearly, you must pretend and invent.”

 

149. “The Marquis de Sade said that the most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage. When a boss humiliates an employee, or a man humiliates his wife, he is merely being cowardly or taking his revenge on life, they are people who have never dared to look into the depths of their soul, never attempted to know the origin of that desire to unleash the wild beast, or to understand that sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences.

“Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here.”
 

149. She had spent the last nine months controlling the world around her, and shortly before she was due to go back to her own country, she was finding that she was capable of loving without demanding anything in return and of suffering for no reason. It was as if life had chosen this strange, sordid way of teaching her something about her own mysteries, her light and her darkness.

 

153. Now she was searching once more for her reason for living, or, rather, for the kind of utter surrender by which a person offers his or her heart and asks for nothing in return.

 

153. For example, you awaken desire by not immediately handing over the object of desire.

 

154. That encounter had stirred her soul in a way she did not like at all.

 

159. “Desire is not what you see, but what you imagine.”

 

161. Life was made up of simple things; he was weary of all the years he had spent searching for something, though quite what he didn’t know.

 

162. They needed to stop, because if they took one more step, the magic would be undone by reality.”

 

164. Every human being experiences his or her own desire; it is part of our personal treasure and, although, as an emotion, it can drive people away, generally speaking, it brings those who are important to us closer. It is an emotion chosen by my soul, and it is so intense that it can infect everything and everyone around me.

 

170. It was normal to feel jealous, although life had taught her that it was pointless thinking you could own another person—anyone who believes that is just deceiving themselves. Despite this, she could not stop herself having these feelings of jealousy, or of having grand intellectual thoughts about it, or even thinking it was a proof of fragility.

“The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate fragility. Anyway, if my love is real (and not just a way of distracting myself, deceiving myself, and passing the time that never seems to pass in the city), freedom will conquer jealousy and any pain it causes me, since pain is also part of the natural process. Anyone who practices sport knows this: if you want to achieve your objectives, you have to be prepared for a daily dose of pain or discomfort. At first, it’s unpleasant and demotivating, but in time you come to realize that it’s part of the process of feeling good, and the moment arrives when, if you don’t feel pain, you have a sense that the exercises aren’t having the desired effect.”
The danger lies in focusing on that pain, giving it a particular person’s name, and keeping it always present in your thoughts. Maria, thank God, had managed to free herself from that.
 

172. To avoid beautiful thoughts turning into suffering, she developed a method: when something to positive to do with Ralf Hart came into her head—and this could be the fire and the wine, an idea she would like to discuss with him, or simply the pleasurable longing involved in wanting to know when he would come back—Maria would stop what she was doing, smile up at the sky and give thanks for being alive and to be expecting nothing from the man she loved.

On the other hand, if her heart began to complain about his absence or about things she shouldn’t have said while they were together, he would say to herself:
“Oh, so you want to think about that, do you? All right, then, you do what you like, while I get on with more important things.”
She would continue to read or, if she was out, she would focus her attention on everything around her: colors, people, sounds—especially sounds, the sound of her own footsteps, of the pages turning, of cars, of fragments of conversations, and the unfortunate thought would eventually go away. If it came back give minutes later, she would repeat the process, until those thoughts, finding themselves accepted but also gently rejected, would stay away for quite considerable periods of time.
One of these “negative thoughts” was the possibility of never seeing him again. With a little practice and a great deal of patience, she managed to transform this into a “positive thought”: when she left, Geneva would have the face of a man with old-fashioned long hair, a child-like smile and a grave voice. If someone asked her, many years later, what the place she had known in her youth was like, she could reply:
“Very beautiful, and capable of loving and being loved.”
 

173. Everything is important. If you live your life intensely, you experience pleasure all the time and don’t feel the need for sex.

 

176. “You’re like me. You’re not here for the thousand francs, but out of a sense of guilt and dependency, because of your various complexes and insecurities. That is neither good nor bad, it’s simply human nature.”

 

176. “As I say, it’s the human condition. Ever since we were expelled from paradise, we have either been suffering, making other people suffer or watching the suffering of others. It’s beyond our control.”

 

178. Everything was conspiring to make the moment perfect, as if the energies of the skies and the earth were also showing their violent side.

 

179. Here, she was no one, and being no one meant that she could be everything she had ever dreamed of. #conoroberst

 

184. For a moment, he sat remembering the first time he had experienced that mysterious relationship between two being who want to be close, but can only be so by inflicting suffering…

She loved him and couldn’t understand why he behaved like that; he loved her and couldn’t understand his own behavior. It was as if the agony that the one inflicted on the other was necessary, fundamental to life.
 

184. …and he realized that she was driving him mad, but it was as if he was so accustomed to suffering now that he could not live without it.

 

186. Ever since the Dark Ages, man has understood that suffering, if confronted without fear, is his passport to freedom.

 

188. When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.

 

194. “He made me walk on stones, just as I am making you do today. He made me feel the cold. He forced me to understand the beauty of pain, except that the pain was imposed by nature, not by man. He called this shu-gen-do, a very ancient practice apparently.

“He told me that I was someone who wasn’t afraid of pain, and that was good, because in order to master the soul, one must also learn to master the body. He told me, too, that I was using pain in the wrong way, and that was very bad.”
 

197. At the far extremity of pain, she had discovered a door into a different level of consciousness, and there was no room now for anything but implacable nature and her own invincible self.

 

197. There are certain sufferings which can only be forgotten once we have succeeded in floating above our own pain.

 

199. “The woodcutter told me that whenever you do some form of physical exercise, when you demand the maximum from your body, the mind gains a strange spiritual strength, which has to do with the ‘light’ I saw in you.”

 

200. “You experienced pain yesterday and you discovered that it led to pleasure. You experienced it today and found peace. That’s why I’m telling you: don’t get used to it, because it’s very easy to become habituated; it’s a very powerful drug. It’s in our daily lives, in our hidden suffering, in the sacrifices we make, blaming love for the destruction of our dreams. Pain is frightening when it shows its real face, but it’s seductive when it comes disguised as sacrifice or self-denial. Or cowardice. However much we may reject it, we human beings always find a way of being with pain, of flirting with it and making it part of our lives.”

“I don’t believe that. No one wants to suffer.”
“If you think you can live without suffering, that’s a great step forward, but don’t imagine that other people will understand you. True, no one wants to suffer, and yet nearly everyone seeks out pain and sacrifice, and then they feel justified, pure, deserving of the respect of their children, husbands, neighbors, God. Don’t let’s think about that now; all you need to know is that what makes the world go round is not the search for pleasure, but the renunciation of all that is important.
“…pain and suffering are used to justify the one thing that should bring only joy: love.”
 

205. But I cannot simply do nothing, pretend that everything is normal, that it’s just a stage, a phase of my life. I want to forget it, I need to love—that’s all, I need to love.

            Life is too short, or too long, for me to allow myself the luxury of living it so badly.
 

207. It’s raining, and at this time of night, no one is walking there, although they have for years, decades, centuries—perhaps the road needs to breathe, to rest from the many steps that trudge along it every day.

 

208. Original sin was not the apple that Eve ate, it was her belief that Adam needed to share precisely the thing she had tasted. Eve was afraid to follow her path without someone to help her, and so she wanted to share what she was feeling.

Certain things cannot be shared. Nor can we be afraid of the oceans into which we plunge of our own free will; fear cramps everyone’s style. Man goes through hell in order to understand this. Love one another, but let’s not try to possess one another.
I love this man sitting before me now, because I do not possess him and he does not possess me. We are free in our mutual surrender; I need to repeat this dozens, hundreds, millions of times, until I finally believe my own words.
 

208. …a man is also a woman; he wants to find someone, to give meaning to his life.

 

208. …the search for happiness is more important than the need for pain.

 

208. …bodies always understand each other, even when souls do not.

 

213. Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with two perfect winds and with glossy, colorful, marvelous feathers. In short, he was a creature made to fly about freely in the sky, bringing joy to everyone who saw him.

            One day, a woman saw this bird and fell in love with him. She watched his flight, her mouth wide in amazement, her heart pounding, her eyes shining with excitement. She invited the bird to fly with her, and the two travelled across the sky in perfect harmony. She admired and venerated and celebrated that bird.
            But then she thought: He might want to visit far-off mountains! And she was afraid, afraid that she would never feel the same way about any other bird. And she felt envy, envy for the bird’s ability to fly.
            And she felt alone.
            And she thought: “I’m going to set a trap. The next time the bird appears, he will never leave again.”
            The bird, who was also in love, returned the following day, fell into the trap and was put into a cage.
            She looked at the bird every day. There he was, the object of her passion, and she showed him to her friends, who said: “Now you have everything you could possibly want.” However, a strange transformation began to take place: now that she had the bird and no longer needed to woo him, she began to lose interest. The bird, unable to fly and express the true meaning of his life, began to waste away and his feathers to lose their gloss; he grew ugly; and the woman no longer paid him any attention, except by feeding him and cleaning out his cage.
One day, the bird died. The woman felt terribly sad and spent all her time thinking about him. But she did not remember the cage, she thought only of the day when she had seen him for the first time, flying contentedly amongst the clouds.
            If she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realized that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings in motion, not his physical body.
            Without the bird, her life too lost all meaning, and Death came knocking at her door. “Why have you come?” she asked Death. “So that you can fly once more with him across the sky,” Death replied. “If you had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved him and admired him even more; alas, you now need me in order to find him again.”
 

217. She would not cage the bird, nor would she suggest he go with her to Brazil; he was the only truly pure thing that had happened to her. A bird like that must fly free and feed on nostalgia for the time when he flew alongside someone else.

 

218. Always making plans for the future, and always being surprised by the present, she thought to herself. She felt she had discovered herself through independence, despair, love, pain, and back again to love—and she would like things to end there.

 

220. …lying made life so complicated, she was always forgetting what she had said.

 

231. The further off they are, the closer to the heart are all those feelings that we try to repress and forget. It we’re in exile, we want to store away every tiny memory of our roots. If we’re far from the person we love, everyone we pass in the streets reminds us of them.

 

233. …nothing was as she had imagined it would be.

 

233. But she was happy; she knew the time had come to stop.

Not many people do.
 

234. But their relationship was based on freedom, and no other sort of relationship would work—perhaps that was the only reason they loved each other, because they knew they did not need each other. Men always take fright when a woman says: “I need you,” and Maria wanted to take away with her the image of a Ralf Hart who was utterly in love and utterly hers, and ready to do anything for her.

 

234. It’s odd how, when you live in a city, you always postpone getting to know it and usually end up never knowing it at all.

She thought she would feel happy because she was going home, but she wasn’t. She thought she would feel sad because she was leaving a city that had treated her so well, but she didn’t. The only thing she could do now was to shed a few tears, feeling rather afraid of herself, an intelligent young woman, who had everything going for her, but who tended to make the wrong decisions.
She just hoped that this time she was right.
 

237. She knelt down and promised God, the Virgin, Jesus and all the saints that whatever happened that day, she would not change her mind and would leave anyway. She made this promise because she knew love’s traps all too well, and knew how easily they can change a woman’s mind.

 

253. Yes, I love you very much, as I have never loved another man, and that is precisely why I am leaving, because, if I stayed, the dream would become reality, the desire to possess, to want your life to be mine…in short, all the things that transform love into slavery. It’s best left like this—a dream. We have to be careful what we take from a country, or from life.

 

255. “The art of love is like your painting, it requires technique, patience, and, above all, practice by the couple. It requires boldness, the courage to go beyond what people conventionally call ‘making love.’”

 

255. At one point, I even considered asking God’s forgiveness and breaking my promise. But reality returned, telling me to remember to preserve my dream intact and not to fall into destiny’s traps.

 

263. “What made you fall in love with a prostitute?”

            “I didn’t understand it myself at the time. But I’ve thought about it since, and I think it was because, knowing that your body would never be mine alone, I had to concentrate on conquering your soul.”
            “Weren’t you jealous?”
            “You can’t say to the spring: ‘Come on now and last as long as possible.’ You can only say: ‘Come and bless me with your hope, and stay as long as you can.’”
 

265. She got dressed, picked up her suitcases and left, hoping against hope that he would wake up and ask her to stay.

 

266. No, films never show that. They finish before the real world begins. It’s best not to think too much about it.

 

268. The doors opened, the passengers emerged and embraced whoever was waiting for them, wife, mother, children. Maria pretended not to notice, at the same time pondering her own loneliness, except that this time she had a secret, a dream, which would make her solitude less bitter, and life would be easier.

 

268. On the other hand, she now had enough money to buy a farm, she had her youth ahead of her, a great deal of experience of life and a great independence of soul. Nevertheless, as always happened when fate chose for her, she thought, once again, that she would take the risk.