“Eleven Minutes” by Paulo Coelho and I’ve written about it last year here.
I always recommend it to my friends, in fact I lend it to my friends.
I loved this book because I’ve learned so much from it and maybe Pocholo was right, I can relate so much to it. I won’t say much about the book but definitely it’s more than a story about sacred sex, it’s about being rejected, heartbroken, hopelessness, finding hope and finding yourself and finding love.
I will instead post some excerpts from the book that really moved me.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle.”
“Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it – which of these two attitudes is the least destructive? I don’t know.”
“Really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.”
“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.”
“Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it – which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?”
“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.”
“I’ve met a man and fallen in love with him. I allowed myself to fall in love for one simple reason: I’m not expecting anything to come of it. I know that, in three months’ time, I’ll be far away and he’ll be just a memory, but I couldn’t stand living without love any longer; I had reached my limit… Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meeting 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 directions.”
I love the last part of the book and how the love making was written in every details but I hate how the story ends I find it more typical.
This reminds me that I still haven’t find a good read for a couple of months already. I haven’t read “By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept” and I really want to but unfortunately until now I cannot find one.
So far I’ve read 6 books of Paulo Coelho, Eleven minutes is still with Chris while I have two books (The Zahir and The Winner Stands Alone) back in Manila and embarrassing as it is, I haven’t read The Alchemist!
