Paulo Coelho forever.

• “Life has a way of testing a person’s will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen at once.”

• “It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory.”

• “What hurts us is what heals us.”

• “Only two things can reveal life’s great secrets: suffering and love.”

• “In magic – and in life – there is only the present moment, the now. You can’t measure time the way you measure the distance between two points. ‘Time’ doesn’t pass. We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we’re always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better, about the consequences of our actions, and about why we didn’t act as we should have. Or else we think about the future, about what we’re going to do tomorrow, what precautions we should take, what dangers await us around the next corner, how to avoid what we don’t want and how to get what we have always dreamed of.”

• “Sometimes you have to travel a long way to find what is near.”

• “When someone leaves, its because someone else is about to arrive — I’ll find love again.”

• “No one ever loses anyone. We are all one soul that needs to continue growing and developing in order for the world to carry on and for us all to meet once again.”

• “Suffering comes from desire, not from pain.”

• “We become imprisoned by our memories, and that makes our lives wretched.”

• “I’ve been in love before, it’s like a narcotic. At first it brings the euphoria of complete surrender. The next day you want more. You’re not addicted yet, but you like the sensation, and you think you can still control things. You think about the person you love for two minutes then forget them for three hours. But then you get used to that person, and you begin to be completely dependent on them. Now you think about him for three hours and forget him for two minutes. If he’s not there, you feel like an addict who can’t get a fix. And just as addicts steal and humiliate themselves to get what they need, you’re willing to do anything for love.”

• “At every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.”

• “The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don’t talk anymore, they don’t sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories.”

• “No matter how you feel today, get up, dress up and show up.”

• “God hides the fires of hell within paradise.”

• “You are not trying to find the answer to a question, you are simply trying to confirm something you desperately want to believe.”