Eleven Minutes

I just finished reading Eleven Minutes by Paul Coelho. This book was amazing. It touches all different topics, but its mainly about a life of a girl from Brazil who has big dreams about love, life, husband, kids, career, etc, but ends up entering the profession of prostitution when she come to Switzerland. She is very proud and happy of herself for who she is and what her profession is. The story goes on about her experiences with her clients, and specifically two clients who teach her about pain, love, suffering, and being happy. At times this book is confusing, but overall its a great story.







Quotes from the book:

"When we meet someone and fall is 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 vanish so quickly? Life moives very fast. It rushes us from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds" (9)

"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 those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart." (16)

"Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decison. but making mistakes is part of life. What does the world want from 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?.... IfI 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 lifes out of my system. The little experience that life 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 thiers forever (as has happened often enough to me already) finally come to realize that nothing really belongs to them. And if nothing belongs to me, then there is no point wasting my time looking after things that aren't mine; its best to live as if today were the first (or last) day of my life." (26)

"I stood fir a long time by the rollen coaster, and I noticed that most people get on it in search of excitement, but that onces it startsm 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, round and round on the sopt?" (47)

"But why? They're just paying for their own satisfaction." "No, that's where you're wrong. A mans doesn't prove's he's a man by getting an erection. He's only a real man if he can pleasure a woman. And if he can pleasure a prostitute, he'll be the best lover on the block." (77)

"All my life I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The personh who givens him or herself wholly, the person who feel freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly. And the person who loves wholeheartedly feels free. That is why, regardless of what Imight experience, do or learn, nothing makes sense. I hope this time passes quicly, so that I can resume my search for myself- in the form of man who understands me and doest not make suffer. But whta I am saying? In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame somone 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 looses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owing it." (90)

"She was just like everyone else, she endured her lonliness in silence, tried to justify everything she did, pretended to be strong when she was feeling weak or weak when she was feeling strong, she had renounced love and taken up to a dangerous profession... (100)

"Now you just see the glass of anisette before you?" he went on "Now, you jus see the anisette. I, on the other hand, because I need to be inside of everything I do, see the plant it came from, the storms the plant enduredm the hand that picked the grain, the voyage by ship from another land, the smells and colors with which the plant allows itself to be imbued before it was placed in the alcohol. If I were to paint this scene, I would pain all those things, even though, when you saw the painting, you would think you were looking at a simple glass of anisette." (105)

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightned because, whe it appears, it demolished all the cold things it finds in its path. No one wants their life throw into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under contol, adn are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of those supresed. Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all thier problems. They make the other person responsible for thier happiness adn blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected just ruined everything. Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it- which of these two attitudes is the least destructive? I don't know." (120)

"We take turns. One cannot exist without the other; no one can know how to humiliate another person if they themselves have not experienced humiliaion." (148)

"You experienced pain yesterday and you discovered that it lead to pleasure. You experienced it today and you found peace. That's why I'm telling you: don't get used to it, because it's very easy to become habituate; it'a 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 dream. Pain is frightening when it's shows its real face, but it's seductive when t come disguised as sacrifice or self-denial. Or cowardice. However much we reject it, we human beings alwaus find a way of being with pain, of flirting with it and making it part of our life." (201)

"But they didn't. She looked around her. People were walking along, heads down, hurrying off to work, to school, to the employment agency, to Rue de Berne, telling themselves: "I can't wait a little longer, I have a dream, but there's no need to realize it today, besides, I need to earn some money." Of course, everyone spoke ill of her profession, but, basically, it was all a question of selling her time, like everyon else. Doing things she didn't want to do, like everyone else. Putting up with horrible people, like everyone else. Handing over her precious body and her precious soul in the name of a future that never arrived, like everyone else. Saything that she still didn't have enough, like everyone else. Waiting just a little bit longer, like everyone else...." (225)

"A time to be born, a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is a planted;
A time to break down, a time to build up;
A time to weep, a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, 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 time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love and a time to hate;
A time to war and time of peace." (263)