Missed chances. She had learned very early on what that meant. ‘I love you’, though, were three words she had often heard during her twenty-two years, and it seemed to her that they were now completely devoid of meaning, because they had never turned into anything serious or deep, never translated into a lasting relationship.
[…]I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It’s all a question of how I view my life.
[…]If I had fallen asleep and suddenly woken up on a roller coaster, what would I feel? Well, I would feel trapped and sick, terrified of every bend, wanting to get off. However, if I believe that the track is my destiny and that God is in charge of the machine, then the nightmare becomes something thrilling. It becomes exactly what it is, a roller coaster, a safe, reliable toy, which will eventually stop, but, while the journey lasts, I must look at the surrounding landscape and whoop with excitement.
[…]A writer once said that it is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone’s mind is love. What nonsense!
[…]The person who wrote that clearly knew only one side of the coin. Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person’s whole life, from one moment to the next. But there was the other side of the coin, the second thing that could make a human being take a totally different course from the one he or she had planned; and that was called despair. Yes, perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly.
[…]That’s what the world is like: people talk as if they knew everything, but if you dare to ask a question, they don’t know anything.
[…]Some people were born to face life alone, and this is neither good nor bad, it is simply life.
[…]“When your client comes, you must always groan as if you were having an orgasm too. That guarantees customer loyalty.”
“But why? They’re just paying for their own satisfaction.”
“No, that’s where you’re wrong. A man doesn’t prove he’s a man by getting an erection. He’s only a real man if he can pleasure a woman. And if he can pleasure a prostitute, he’ll think he’s the best lover on the block.”
[…]For a prostitute, the kiss was sacred. Nyah had taught her to keep her kisses for the love of her life, just like in the story of Sleeping Beauty; a kiss that would waken her from her slumbers and return her to the world of fairy tales, in which Switzerland was once more the country of chocolate, cows and clocks.
[…]Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.
[…]All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that’s 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. And the person who loves wholeheartedly feels free.
[…]In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel. It hurt when I lost each of the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
[…]“You have a glow about you. The light that comes from sheer willpower, the light of someone who has made important sacrifices in the name of things she thinks are important. It’s in your eyes – the light is in your eyes.”
[…]There is a name for that pebble: passion. It can be used to describe the beauty of an earth-shaking meeting between two people, but it isn’t just that. It’s there in the excitement of the unexpected, in the desire to do something with real fervor, in the certainty that one is going to realize a dream. Passion sends us signals that guide us through our lives, and it’s up to me to interpret those signs.
[…]Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A 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?
[…]Don’t ask me: “Why me? What’s so special about me?” There isn’t anything special about you, at least, nothing I can put my finger on. And yet and here’s the mystery of life – I can’t think of anything else.
[…]Dreams like theirs never lasted long, and Maria had enough experience of life to know that reality usually chose not to fit in with her dreams. And that was now her great joy: to say to reality that she didn’t need it, that she was no longer dependent on what happened in order to be happy.
[…]“In just about every other novel you can see around you there’s always at least one sex scene. Whether it’s hidden away in pretty little love stories or discussed in serious tomes on human behavior, it appears to be all anyone thinks about.” Maria, with all her experience, knew that the woman was wrong: people wanted to think like that because they thought sex was everyone else’s sole concern. They went on diets, wore wigs, spent hours at the hairdresser’s or at the gym, put on sexy clothes, all in an attempt to awaken the necessary spark. And what happened? When the moment came to go to bed with someone, eleven minutes later it was all over. There was no creativity involved, nothing that would lift them up to paradise; the fire provoked by the spark soon burned out.
[…]Really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.
[…]Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meetings are waiting for us, but more often than not, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes direction. Everyone knows how to love, because we are all born with that gift. Some people have a natural talent for it, but the majority of us have to re-learn, to remember how to love, and everyone, without exception, needs to burn on the bonfire of past emotions, to relive certain joys and griefs, certain ups and downs, until they can see the connecting thread that exists behind each new encounter; because there is a connecting thread.
[…]There is no greater pleasure than that of initiating someone into an unknown world. Taking someone’s virginity – the virginity not of their body, but of their soul, you understand.
[…]Remember: it is a play. You must be the person you have never had the courage to be. Gradually, you will discover that you are that person, but until you can see this clearly, you must pretend and invent.
[…]No one can know how to humiliate another person if they themselves have not experienced humiliation.
[…]The Marquis de Sade said that the most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage.
[…]When a boss humiliates an employee, or a man humiliates his wife, he is merely being cowardly or taking his revenge on life, they are people who have never dared to look into the depths of their soul, never attempted to know the origin of that desire to unleash the wild beast, or to understand that sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences. ‘Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here.’
[…]It’s true that we only know each other when we come up against our own limits, but it’s wrong too, because it isn’t necessary to know everything about ourselves; human beings weren’t made solely to go in search of wisdom, but also to plough the land, wait for rain, plant the wheat, harvest the grain, make the bread.
[…]I am two women: one wants to have all the joy, passion and adventure that life can give me. The other wants to be a slave to routine, to family life, to the things that can be planned and achieved.
[…]You awaken desire by not immediately handing over the object of that desire.
[…]Since I was in the company of an intellectual, I would quote from Plato. According to him, at the beginning of creation, men and women were not as they are now; there was just one being, who was rather short, with a body and a neck, but his head had two faces, looking in different directions. It was as if two creatures had been glued back to back, with two sets of sex organs, four legs and four arms. The Greek gods, however, were jealous, because this creature with four arms could work harder; with its two faces, it was always vigilant and could not be taken by surprise; and its four legs meant that it could stand or walk for long periods at a time without tiring. Even more dangerous was the fact that the creature had two different sets of sex organs and so needed no one else in order to continue reproducing. Zeus, the supreme lord of Olympus, said: “I have a plan to make these mortals lose some of their strength.” And he cut the creature in two with a lightning bolt, thus creating man and woman. This greatly increased the population of the world, and, at the same time, disoriented and weakened its inhabitants, because now they had to search for their lost half and embrace it and, in that embrace, regain their former strength, their ability to avoid betrayal and the stamina to walk for long periods of time and to withstand hard work. That embrace in which the two bodies re-fuse to become one again is what we call sex.
[…]Desire is not what you see, but what you imagine.
[…]Every human being experiences his or her own desire; it is part of our personal treasure and, although, as an emotion, it can drive people away, generally speaking, it brings those who are important to us closer. It is an emotion chosen by my soul, and it is so intense that it can infect everything and everyone around me.
[…]As I say, it’s the human condition. Ever since we were expelled from paradise, we have either been suffering, making other people suffer or watching the suffering of others. It’s beyond our control.
[…]The art of sex is the art of controlled abandon.
[…]After all, we are human beings, we are born full of guilt; we feel terrified when happiness becomes a real possibility; and we die wanting to punish everyone else because we feel impotent, ill-used and unhappy.
[…]Don’t get used to it because it’s very easy to become habituated; it’s a very powerful drug. It’s in our daily lives, in our hidden suffering, in the sacrifices we make, blaming love for the destruction of our dreams. Pain is frightening when it shows its real face, but it’s seductive when it comes disguised as sacrifice or self-denial. Or cowardice. However much we may reject it, we human beings always find a way of being with pain, of flirting with it and making it part of our lives.
[…]If you think you can live without suffering, that’s a great step forward, but don’t imagine that other people will understand you. True, no one wants to suffer, and yet nearly everyone seeks out pain and sacrifice, and then they feel justified, pure, deserving of the respect of their children, husbands, neighbors, God.
[…]Certain things cannot be shared. Nor can we be afraid of the oceans into which we plunge of our own free will; fear cramps everyone’s style. Man goes through hell in order to understand this. Love one another, but let’s not try to possess one another.
[…]Bodies always understand each other, even when souls do not.
[…]It’s odd how, when you live in a city, you always postpone getting to know it and usually end up never knowing it at all.
[…]We don’t learn because we haven’t the courage to say to the woman: show me your body. We don’t learn because the woman doesn’t have the courage to say: this is what I like. We are stuck with our primitive survival instincts, and that’s that.
