"No one should ever ask themselves that: why am I unhappy?

The question carries within it the virus that will destroy

everything. If we ask that question, it means that we want to

find out what makes us happy. If what makes us happy is

different from what we have now, then we must either change

once and for all or stay as we are, feeling even more unhappy"

"Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with two perfect wings and with glossy, colourful, marvellous feathers. In short, he was a creature made to fly about freely in the sky, bringing joy to everyone who saw him.

One day, a woman saw this bird and fell in love with him. She watched his flight, her mouth wide in amazement, her heart pounding, her eyes shining with excitement. She invited the bird to fly with her, and the two travelled across the sky in perfect harmony. She admired and venerated and celebrated that bird.

But then she thought:He might want to visit far-off mountains! And she was afraid, afraid that she would never feel the same way about any other bird. And she felt envy, envy for the bird's ability to fly. And she felt alone. And she thought: "Im going to set a trap. The next time the bird appears, he will never leave again."

The bird, who was also in love, returned the following day, fell into the trap and was put in a cage.

She looked at the bird everyday. There he was, the object of her passion, and she showed him to her friends, who said: 'Now, you have everything you could possibly want'. However, a strange transformation began to take place;now that she had the bird and no longer needed to woo him, she began to lose interest. The bird, unable to fly and express the true meaning of his life, began to waste away and his feather to lose their gloss; he grew ugly; and the woman no longer paid him any attention, except by feeding him and cleaning out his cage.

One day, the bird died. The woman felt terribly sad and spent all her time thinking about him. But she did not remember the cage, she thought only of the day when she had seen him for first time, flying contentedly amongst the clouds.

If she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realised that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings in motion, not his physical body.

Without the bird, her life too lost all meaning, and Death came knocking at her door. 'Why have you come?' she asked Death. 'So that you can fly once more with him across the sky'. Death replied 'If you had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved and admired him even more; alas, you now need me in order to find him again'."

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."