Paulo Coelho never ceases to amaze me. While his latest, The Witch of Portobello, is a bit weirder than usual in my opinion, it's no less thought provoking than his usual. Here are a few excerpts that spoke to me.

"What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows."

...

"I've always been a very restless person. I work hard, spend too much time looking after my son, I dance like a mad thing, I learned calligraphy, I go to courses on selling, I read one book after another. But that's all a way of avoiding those moments when nothing is happening, because those blank spaces give me a feeling of absolute emptiness, in which not a single crumb of love exists. My parents have always done everything they could for me, and I do nothing but disappoint them. But here, during the time we spent together, celebrating nature and the Great Mother, I've realized that those empty spaces were starting to get filled up. They were transformed into pauses - the moment when the man lifts his hand from the drum before bringing it down again to strike hard. I think I can leave now..."

...

Everything is at once so simple and so complicated! It's simple because all it takes is a change of attitude: I'm not going to look for happiness anymore. From now on, I'm independent; I see life through my eyes and not through other people's. I'm going in search of the adventure of being alive.

And it's complicated: Why am I not looking for happiness when everyone has taught me that happiness is the only goal worth pursuing? Why am I going to risk taking a path that no one else is taking?

After all, what is happiness?

Love, they tell me. But love doesn't bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it's a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it's sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we're doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.

All right then, peace. Peace? If we look at the Mother, she's never at peace. The winter does battle with the summer, the sun and the moon never meet, the tiger chases the man, who's afraid of the dog, who chases the cat, who chases the mouse, who frightens the man.

Money brings happiness. Fine. In that case, everyone who earns enough to have a high standard of living would be able to stop working. But then they're more troubled than ever, as if they were afraid of losing everything. Money attracts money, that's true. Poverty might bring unhappiness, but money won't necessarily bring happiness.

I spent a lot of my life looking for happiness; now what I want is joy. Joy is like sex - it begins and end. I want pleasure. I want to be contended, but happiness? I no longer fall into that trap

.....

Reprogram yourself every minute of each day with thoughts that make you grow. When you're feeling irritated or confused, try to laugh at yourself. Laugh out loud at this woman tormented by doubts and anxieties, convinced that her problems are the most important thing in the world. Laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation, at the fact that despite being a manifestation of the Mother, you still believe God is a man who lays down the rules. Most of our problems stem from just that - from following rules.

....

"...Like love for example. People either feel it or they don't, and there isn't a force in the world that can make them feel it. We can pretend that we love each other. We can get used to each other. We can live a whole lifetime of friendship and complicity, we can bring up children, have sex every night, reach orgasm, and still feel that there's a terrible emptiness about it all, that something important is missing."