From Paulo Coelho's "ELEVEN MINUTES"

"All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, thats a lie; 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 most wholeheartedly.

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.

Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. At 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. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten, They are the engineers of the superseded. Other people think exactly the opposite; they surrender themselves without a second thought hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything. Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it -which of these two attitudes is the least destructive? I dont know.

Ive learned that waiting is the most difficult bit and I want to get used to the feeling, knowing that you are with me, even when you are not by my side.

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 celebrate 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.

Ive met a man and fallen in love with him. I allowed myself to fall in love for one simple reason. Im not expecting anything to come of it. I know that, in three months time, Ill be far away and he ll be just a memory, but I couldnt stand living without love any longer; I had reached my limit. Im not sure he ll come back to the club where I work, but, for the first time in my life, that doesnt matter. Its enough just to love him, to be with him in my thoughts and to color this lovely city with his steps, his words, his love. When I leave this country, it will have a face and name and the memory of a fireplace. Everything else I experienced here, all the difficulties I had to overcome, will be as nothing compared to that memory.

Really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other."