I couple of weeks ago I finished reading "By The River Piedra I Sat Down And Wept" ~ By Paulo Coelho.
Here are some of my favorite excerpts from the book:
- “Some people always have to be doing battle with someone, sometimes even with themselves, battling with their own lives. So they begin to create a kind of play in their head, and they write the script based on their frustrations.”
- “Life takes us by surprise and orders us to move toward the unknown--even when we don't want to and when we think we don't need to."
- "I began to imagine how I would like to be living right at that moment. I wanted to be happy, curious,joyful-living every moment intensely, drinking the water of life thirstily. Believing again in my dreams. Able to fight for what I wanted.
- "If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible."
- "I will not talk to my own darkness anymore, I promised myself, closing the door on the Other. A fall from the third floor hurts as much as a fall from the hundredth. If I have to fall, may it be from a high place."
- "Break the glass, I thought to myself, because it is a symbolic gesture. Try to understand that within myself, things were breaking of much more importance than a glass, and I’m happy for that. Look to your own inner struggles and break this glass."
- "You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen."
- Every day, God gives us the sun - and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy.
- Every day, we try to pretend that we haven’t perceived the moment, that it doesn’t exist – that today is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention in their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment. It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seems the same to us. But that moment exists – a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles.
- Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest. Our magic moment help us to change and sends us off in search of our dreams. Yes, we are going to suffer, we will have difficult times, and we will experience many disappointments – but all of this is transitory it leaves no permanent mark. And one day we will look back with pride and faith at the journey we have taken.
- Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back – and at some point everyone looks back – she will hear her heart saying, “What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage; the certainty that you wasted your life.
- Pitiful are the people who must realize this. Because when they are finally able to believe in miracles, their life's magic moments will have already passed them by."
