Bookish Mardi: Quotes from Paulo Coelho's Eleven Minutes

“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.”
― Paulo Coelho

Book Summary

Maria, a young girl from a remote village of Brazil, with innocent brushes with love failures at an early adolescent stage and hatred for love goes to seek her fortune in Switzerland, only to find that reality is a lot harder than she expected. After working in a nightclub as a samba dancer for a brief period, she realizes that this is not what she wants. After a heated discussion with her manager one night, she storms out and begins to look for a career in modeling. After a long unsuccessful search for a position in that field, and as she starts running out of money, she engages herself for 1000 francs for "one night" with an Arab man. Delighted with the easy money and after compromising with her soul she lands in a brothel on Rue de Berne, the heart of Geneva's red-light district...

There she befriends Nyah who gives her advice on her "new profession" and after learning the tricks of the trade from Milan, the brothel owner, she enters the job with her body and mind shutting all doors for love and keeps her heart open only for her diary. Quickly she becomes quite successful and famous and her colleagues begin to envy her. Months pass and Maria grows into a professionally groomed prostitute who not only relaxes her clients' mind, but also calms their soul by talking to them about their problems.

Her world turns upside down when she meets Ralf, a young Swiss painter, who sees her "inner light". Maria falls in love with him immediately and begins to experience what true love is (according to the author, it is a sense of being for someone without actually possessing him/her). Maria is now torn between her sexual fantasies and true love for Ralf. Eventually she decides that it is time for her to leave Geneva with her memory of Ralf, because she realizes that they are worlds apart. But before leaving, she decides to rekindle the dead sexual fire in Ralf and learns from him about the nature of Sacred Sex, sex which is mingled with true love and which involves the giving up of one's soul for the loved one.

This book explores the sacred nature of sex. "Eleven minutes" describes the duration of sex. Also, it depicts two types of prostitution: prostitution for money and sacred prostitution. There are also direct references to sadomasochism.

The story is of Maria's journey to find what true love is by letting her own life guide her. She enters a life that leads her down the path of sexual awakening and almost leads to her self-destruction when she is introduced to all sides of sexual experience. When she has given up hope to find true love, she finds her true "inner light" and her everlasting true love.

 Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven_Minutes

 Remarkable Lines from the Book

". . . there was a place called "somewhere far away". - Maria

 ". . . the world was too large , that love was something very dangerous and that the Virgin was a saint inhabited a distant heaven and didn't listen  to the prayers of children." - Maria

". . . no one can live on impossible dreams." - Maria

"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." - Maria

"How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly?" - Maria

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

". . .  it is not enough just to have great love in your life, you must make sure that everyone know; what a desirable person you are." - Maria

". . . a kind of love that didn't hurt and didn't leave a painful scar on the heart - love for Jesus." - Maria

". . . all magazines, the TV Programmes, books, girlfriends, everything, ABSOLUTE EVERYTHING, said that a man was essential." - Maria

"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." - Maria

". . . love is a terrible thing."  - Maria

". . . I know that the remedy is worse than pain: I simply don't fall in love." - Maria


". . . those who to my heart failed to arouse my body, and that those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart." - Maria

"The power of beauty: what must the world be for ugly women?"

"Beauty, my dear , doesn't last."  - Maria's Mom

"What's a week after all? It will pass in a flash." -Maria

 ". . . a man promises everything and gives you nothing."  - Maria

". . . a woman finds it easier to admit that her husband betrayed her than to admit the state of her wardrobe."

From Maria's diary:
"Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just a part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn't have the courage to say "yes" to life?
. . . I've realized that sometimes you get no second chance and that it's best to accept the gifts the world offers you. Of course it's risky, but  is the risk any greater than the chance of the bus that took forty-eight hours to bring me here having an accident? 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 taught me that no one  owns anything, that everything is an illusion - and that applies to material as well as spiritual.

Anyone who lost something they thought was their forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.

And if nothing belongs to me, then there's no point 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."

***

". . . 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." - Maria

 ". . . opportunities are made to be seized."

". . . when it comes to seductions, feelings and contracts, one should never play around."

"One never knows what life may have in store for us, and it's always good to know where the emergency exit is." - Maria

"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." - Maria

"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." - Maria

 ". . . dreams don't come cheap."   

"What do they expect? Having chosen adventure, shouldn't they be prepared to go the whole day? or do they think that  the intelligent thing to do would be to avoid the ups and downs and spend all their time on carousel. going round and round on the spot?"

"The roller coaster is my life; life is 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."

". . . life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant."

"A writer once said that it is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone's mind is love. What a nonsense!"

 "Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person's whole life from one moment to the next. But there's the other side of the coin, the second thing that could make a human being take a totally different course from 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."

"In the search for happiness, however, all are equal." 

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

". . . enough is enough." 

". . . beauty changes as swiftly as the wind."

"We live in a vale of tears. We can have all the dreams we like, but life is hard, implacable, sad."

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

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

". . . life was teaching her - very fast - that only the strong will survive. To be strong, she must be the best, there's no alternative." 

From Maria's diary:

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 criticise me or feel sorry for me: it merely watched me. Today, I realised why this was happening: it's been such a long time since I though about love or anything called love. It seems to be running away from me, as if it wasn't important anymore and didn't feel welcome. 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." 

***

". . . not everyone chooses to live in the margins of the society."

From Maria's diary:

 "All men, tall or short, arrogant or assuming, friendly or cold, have one characteristic in common: when they come to the club, they are afraid. The more experienced amongst them hide their fear by talking loudly, the more inhibited cannot hide their feelings and start drinking to see if they can drive the fear away. But I am convinced that, with a few very rare expectations - the 'special client' to whom Milan has not yet introduced me - they are all afraid . . . Men are very strange." 

 ***

"Eleven minute. The world revolved around something that only took eleven minutes."

"There's something wrong about the civilisation, and it wasn't the destruction of the Amazon rainforest or the ozone layer, the death of the panda, cigarettes, carcinogenic foodstuffs or prison conditions, as the newspapers would have it. It was precisely the thing she was working with: sex."

"Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, nut not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings." 

From Maria's diary:

"If I were to tell someone about my life today, I could do it in a way that would make them think me a brave, happy, independent woman. Rubbish: I am not even allowed to mention the only word that is more than the eleven minutes - love.

All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that's a lie: freedom does 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 me 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 hurts 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.

***

". . . my life is in constant motion."

". . . men who took least care of their appearance always seemed to have more money than the men in suits and ties."

 ". . . women mature more quickly than men."

"I''m a prostitute through and through from head to toe, ans I don't care who knows. That's my one great virtue: I refuse to deceive myself or you." - Maria

". . . there are three of me, really, depending on who I'm with. There's the Innocent Girl, who gazes admiringly at the man, pretending to be impressed by his tales of power and glory. Then there's the Femme Fatale , who pounces on the most insecure and by doing so, takes control of the situation and relieves them the responsibility, because then they have to worry about anything. And finally, there's the Understanding Mother, who looks after those in need of advice and who listens with an all comprehending air to stories that go in one ear and out the other. Which of the three would you like to meet?"

"What is more important in life? Living or pretending to live?"

"The painter knows when he has found a model. The musician knows when his instrument is well tuned."

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

"Passion. It can be used to describe the beauty of an earth-shaking meeting between two people, but isn't just that. It's there in the excitement of the unexpected, in the desire to do something with real fervour,  in the certainty that one is going to realise a dream. Passion send us signals that guide us through our live." 


From Maria's diary:
I would like to believe that I'm in love. With someone I don't know and who didn't figure in my plans at all. All these months of self-control, of denying love,  have had exactly the opposite result: I have let myself be swept away by the first person who treat me a little differently. . . considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle."

***

"Love is not 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 someon to share our feelings with."

"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."

"I have a lot of pristine train sets in my life, too. 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."

"Brazilians have a strange superstition: when you visit someone for the first time, you must not be the one to open the door when you leave, because if you do, you will never return to that house."


From Maria's diary:
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 woman fall in love with life, they live each moment reverently, consciously, always ready to read 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.

***

 " 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 the past emotions, to relive certain joys and griefs, certain ups and downs, until they can see the connecting thread."

". . . our bodies learn to speak the language of soul, known as sex."

"Sometimes life is very mean." 

"One cannot exist without the other; no one can know hot to humiliate another person if they themselves have not experienced humiliation."

"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."

"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 discover what we are doing here."

". . .it wasn't necessary to know your demons in order to find God."

From Maria's diary:
It's true that we only know each other when we come up against our own limits, but it's wrong, too, because it isn't necessary to know everything about ourselves; human beings weren't made solely to go in search of wisdom, but also to plough the land, wait for rain, plant the wheat, harvest the grain, make the bread.

I am two women:  one wants to have all the joy, passion and adventure that life can give me. The other wants to be slave to routine, to family, to life to the things that can be planned and achieved. I'm a housewife and a prostitute, both of us living in the same body with each other.

The meeting of these two women is a game with serious risks. A divine dance. When we meet, we are two divine energies, two universes colliding. If the meeting is not carried out with due reverence, one universe destroys the other. 

***

"The 'theatre' idea is proving really very heplful; it draws out the real person and drives away the many false people who live inside us."

". . . at the beginning of creation, men and women women were not as they are now; there was just one being, who was rather short, with a body  and a neck, but his head had two faces, looking in different directions. It was as if two creatures had been glued back to back, with two sets of sex organs, four legs and four arms." - Plato 

"Desire is not what you see, but what you imagine."  - Ralf Hart

"Life was made up of simple things."

". . . endings are always more difficult than beginnings."

"The greatest passion isn't sex, but the passion with which it is practised."

"Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they're not." 

"Every human being experiences his or her own desire; it is a 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 affect everything and everyone around me."

 "The strongest love in the love that can demonstrate its fragility."

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

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

". . .pain, once mastered, could lead to religious ecstasy."


From Maria's diary:
When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.

When I experienced humiliation and total submission, I was free. I don't know if it all was a dream, or if it only happens once. I know that I can perfectly well live without it, but I would like to do it again, to repeat the experience, to go still further - closer to God. I remembered what he said about the flagellants, in offering up their pain for salvation of humanity, found pleasure. I didn't want to save humanity, or him or me; I was just there.

The art of sex is the art of controlled abandoned.

***

". . . we are born full of guilt, we feel terrified when happiness becomes a real possibility; and we die wanting to punish everyone else because we feel impotent, ill-used and unhappy."

". . .  expert eye knows what to look for."

". . . in order to master the soul, one must also to master the body."

" . . . whenever you do some amount of physical exercise, when you demand the maximum from your body, the mind gains a strange spiritual strength."

"Pain is frightening when it shows its teal face, but it's seductive when it comes disguised as sacrifice or self-denial."

". . . 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."


"I need love- that's all, I need to love."

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

"Darkness is never absolute, and as soon as her eyes becomes accustomed to it, she can see the man's silhouette."

"Original sin was not the apple the Eve ate, it was her belief that Adam needed to to share precisely the thing she had tasted."

"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 t o understand this. Love one another,  but let's not try to possess one another."

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

". . . the search for happiness is more important than the need for pain."

". . . love was necessary if one was to experience pleasure in bed."

"What the eyes don't see, the heart doesn't grieve over."

"If we're far from the person we love, everyone we pass in the street reminds us of them."

". . . we don't forget who we are - nor can we."

"Men always take offence when a woman says: 'I need you'."

"Everything that  goes against nature Nature, against our most intimate desires, is normal in our eyes, even though it's an aberration in God's eyes."

"We seek out our own inferno."

"The world isn't just about sex."

". . . someone falls in love, loses them and finds them again."


From Maria's diary:
"I think  that perhaps we fall in love the very first instant we see the man of our dreams, even though , at time , reason may be telling us otherwise, and we may fight against that instinct, hoping against hope that we won't win, until there comes a point when we allow ourselves to be vanquished by our feelings.

The art of love is like 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'."

***

"A time to be born, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal;

A time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose;

A time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew;

A time to keep silence, and a time speak;

A time to  love, and a time to hate;

A time of war and a time of peace."

"Films never tell you what happens next."