11 Minutes by Paulo Ceolho
I am not a book lover. To be honest, I can barely count the number of books that I have read till date. Although, I would like to talk about “Eleven Minutes” which I consider as my top favourite. I am sure most of you have read it by now. The author needs no introduction. He is one of the matured writes and a soulful one at that. Although Alchemist has been ranked as the top grossing seller, my vote goes to Eleven Minutes simply because of the simplicity, sensitivity and maturity interwoven in one of the most talked about subjects “love and sex”. The novel explores the sacred nature of love and sex juxtaposed with each. According to me, this is a gift by Paulo and I truly cherish it. For all those people who haven’t read Eleven Minutes, this one’s for you. Thought provoking quotes by the very famous brazilian writer, Paulo Coelho.
At every moment of our lives we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.Eleven Minutes While she was waiting for her Prince Charming to appear, all she could do was dream.
Eleven Minutes When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side… And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.
The Alchemist
From Maria’s Diary. After a while she began to enter a kind of paradise, the feelings grew in 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.
Eleven Minutes
Maria discovers masturbation. …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.
Eleven Minutes The power of beauty: what must the world be like for ugly women?
Eleven Minutes There was one thing her mother said that she never forgot: ‘Beauty, my dear, doesn’t last.’
Eleven Minutes Sometimes you get no second chance and that it’s best to accept the gifts the world offers you.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary. If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary. If I’m looking for true love, I first have to get the mediocre love out of my systems.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary. 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.
The Alchemist
From Maria’s diary. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally come to realize that nothing really belongs to them.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary. It is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone’s mind is love.
Eleven Minutes I’m not a body with a soul, I’m a soul that has a visible part called body.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary. But if I don’t think about love, I will be nothing.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary. 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.
Eleven Minutes 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.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary. 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.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary. 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.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary. There is always a right moment to stop something.
The Alchemist Being young inevitably means making mistakes.
Eleven Minutes Passion: it can be used to describe the beauty of an earth-shaking meeting between two people… It’s there in the excitement of the unexpected, in the desire to do something with real fervor, in the certainty that one is going to realize a dream. Passion sends us signal that guide us through our lives, and it’s up to me to interpret those signs.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary. Considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary. 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.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary. 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.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary. Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it – which of these two attitudes is the least destructive? I don’t know.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary. Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary. What is real always finds a way of revealing itself.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary. Really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.
Eleven Minutes 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.
Eleven Minutes
Terence to Maria, quoting the Marquis de Sade. It wasn’t necessary to know your own demons in order to find God.
Eleven Minutes Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they’re not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or – such is the pleasure they experience – they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them.
Eleven Minutes
Ralf to Maria. 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… 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.
The Alchemist
From Maria’s Diary. The strongest love is love that can demonstrate its fragility.
Eleven Minutes If you want to achieve your objectives, you have to be prepared for daily dose of pain and discomfort.
Eleven Minutes Sex has come to be used as some kind of a drug: in order to escape reality, to forget about problems, to relax. And like all drugs, this is a harmful and destructive practice.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary. We all have a clock inside us, and in order to make love, the hands on both clocks have to be pointing to the same time… If you love another person, you don’t depend on sex act to feel good. Two people who live together and love each other need to adjust the hands of their clocks, with patience and perseverance, until they realize that making love is more than just an encounter, it is genital ‘embrace’.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary. If you live your life intensely, you experience pleasure all the time and don’t feel the need for sex.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary. When a teacher helps someone to discover something, the teacher always learns something new too.
Eleven Minutes
Terence to Maria. 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.
Eleven Minutes
Terence to Maria. Man has understood that suffering, if confronted without fear, is his passport to freedom.
The Alchemist When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary. The art of sex is the art of controlled abandon.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary. We are human beings, we are born full of guilt; we feel terrified when happiness becomes real possibility; and we die wanting to punish everyone else because we feel impotent, ill-used and unhappy.
Eleven Minutes
Ralf to Maria. Why was it that in God’s holy world men were only interested in showing her pain. Sacred pain, pain with pleasure, pain with explanations or without, but always pain, pain, pain…
Eleven Minutes
Maria. “I felt that pain is a woman’s friend.”
“That is the danger.”
“I also felt that pain has its limits.”
Eleven Minutes
Maria and Ralf. …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.
Eleven Minutes
Ralf to Maria. Pain and suffering are used to justify the one thing that brings only joy: love.
Eleven Minutes
Ralf to Maria. 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.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary. Original sin was not the apple that Eve ate, it was her belief that Adam needed to share precisely the thing she had tasted.
The Alchemist
Maria thinking. Certain things cannot be shared. Nor can we be afraid of the ocean into which we plunge 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.
The Alchemist
Maria thinking. They all believe that man feels desire for only eleven minutes a day, and that they’ll pay a fortune for it. That’s not true; a man is also a woman; he wants to find someone, to give meaning to his life.
Eleven Minutes
Maria thinking about the other prostitutes, her mother and her friends. Bodies always understand each other, even when the souls do not.
Eleven Minutes
Maria asks Ralf to touch her and feel her with his hands. 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.
Eleven Minutes
Maria, in her diary, quoting a priest. Love was necessary if one was to experience pleasure in bed.
Eleven Minutes
Maria thinking.
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