AWEFULL

I haven’t been reading books for a long time now, I haven’t purchased a good read nowadays so I just decided to read again one of my favorite novels of all time — Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho. It always feels like the first time even if I have already read this book for several times already. And I am always moved by the lines so I am sharing some of my favorite quotes with you.

For I am the first and the last
I am the venerated and the despised
I am the prostitute and the saint
I am the wife and the virgin
I am the mother and the daughter
I am the arms of my mother
I am the barren and my children are many
I am the married woman and the spinster
I am the woman who gives birth and she who never procreated
I am the consolation for the pain of birth
I am the wife and the husband
And it was my man who created me
I am the mother of my father
I am the sister of my husband
And he is my rejected son
Always respect me
For I am the shameful and the magnificent one.

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.

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.

…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.

If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself.

Sometimes you get no second chance and that it’s best to accept the gifts the world offers you.

If I’m looking for true love, I first have to get the mediocre love out of my systems.

There was one thing her mother said that she never forgot: ‘Beauty, my dear, doesn’t last.’

Humans 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.

All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement… 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 the most.

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.

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.

At every moment of our lives we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.

The strongest love is love that can demonstrate its fragility.

When a teacher helps someone to discover something, the teacher always learns something new too.

The world enjoys suffering and pain. There’s sadism in the way we look at these things, and masochism in our conclusion that we don’t need to know all this in order to be happy, and yet we watch other people’s tragedies and sometimes suffer along with them. 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.

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

“I felt that pain is a woman’s friend.”
“That is the danger.”
“I also felt that pain has its limits.”

In all languages in the world, there’s the same proverb: “What the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over”. Well, I say there isn’t an ounce of truth in it. The further off they are, the closer to the heart are all those feelings we try to repress and forget. If we are 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 street reminds us of them.

…it’s (pain) 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, or flirting with it and making it a part of our lives.

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.

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 writer once said that it is not time that changes a 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.

By the way, most of these came from Maria’s Diary (the lead and the character I have fallen in love with)

If you have time, girlfriends, read this.. you will enjoy, promise!

A conversation between Paulo Coelho and his wife Chris: on the distance, soul and the horizon…

“Before, I looked in the distance, and things in the distance seemed really far, you know? They seemed not to be a part of my world. Because I was used to looking only at things that were close, the things around me.

But two days ago, I got used to looking into the distance. And I saw that besides tables, chairs and objects, my world also included the mountains, clouds, the sky. And my soul — my soul seems to have eyes that it uses to touch those things.

My soul seems to have grown.”

– Chris

“Anyone can see that. But we’re always looking at the things that are closest to us. Looking down and inward. So our power diminishes, and using your term, our soul shrinks.

Because our soul includes nothing but ourselves. It doesn’t include oceans, mountains, other people; it doesn’t even include the walls of the houses where we live.”

– Paulo

taken from THE VALKYRIES by PAULO COELHO

People give flowers as presents because flowers contain the true meaning of LOVE. Anyone who tries to possess a flower will have to watch its beauty fading. But if you simply look at a flower in a field, you will keep it forever, because the flower is part of the evening and the sunset and the smell of damp earth and the clouds on the horizon.

People follow certain paths only to prove that they weren’t the right ones, but that isn’t as bad as choosing a path and then spending the rest of your life wondering if you’d make the right choice. No one could make a choice without feeling afraid.

The Plot:

A new, international bestseller by the author of The Alchemist tells the story of Maria, a young girl from a Brazilian village, whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heartbroken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that “Love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer . . .” A chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune. Instead, she ends up working as a prostitute.

In Geneva, Maria drifts further and further away from love as she develops a fascination with sex. Eventually, Maria’s despairing view of love is put to the test when she meets a handsome young painter. In this odyssey of self-discovery, Maria has to choose between pursuing a path of darkness, sexual pleasure for its own sake, or risking everything to find her own “inner light” and the possibility of sacred sex, sex in the context of love.

In this gripping and daring new novel, Paulo Coelho sensitively explores the sacred nature of sex and love and invites us to confront our own prejudices and demons and embrace our own “inner light.”

My Review:

This book conveys the reality that every woman is in search of her one true love. I can  relate to it since it tells us all that nothing’s gonna hinder us from falling in love. Even mistakes in the past may be irrelevant when someone’s truly loving you. Even how filthy people are, they’ll eventually meet their prince charming who’s gonna take them away from sin and misery.. someone who would see the “inner light”… 

I love the way Coelho writes this book. It talks about sex but not in an appalling way. It’s so natural. It opens my mind in the nature of sex.. that sex really is beautiful.. when comes from the context of LOVE and the sacred sex as well.

I really admire Maria for showing such grace after all the mishaps in her life. And she has too much courage, strength and determination. She’s very independent as well at a very young age. The lines from her diary really moved me. Actually, I’ve fallen in love with her character already.

I just want to share these lines that I got from Maria’s diary, an excerpt from the book “Eleven Minutes” by Paulo Coelho.  It’s kinda deep and I know not all lovers out there would understand and internalize the meaning of it.  As for me, I never knew it until I began experiencing it..

Here goes…

Once upon a time, there was a bird.  He was adorned with two perfect wings 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 in a cage.

She looked at the bird everyday.  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 closet.

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 and admired him even more; alas, you now need me in order to find him again.”

Ayun. Sad noh? 

..an excerpt from “Like the Flowing River” by Paulo Coelho

A rose dreamed day and night about bees, but no bee ever landed on her petals.
The flower, however, continued to dream. During the lost nights, she imagined a heaven full of bees, which flew down to bestow fond kisses on her. By doing this, she was able to last until the next day, when she opened again to the light of the sun.

One night, the moon, who knew of the rose’s loneliness, asked: ‘Aren’t you tired of waiting?’
‘Possibly, but I have to keep trying.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if I don’t remain open, I will simply fade away.’
At times, when loneliness seems to crush all beauty, the only way to resist is to remain open.