The Spy

by Paulo Coelho

The crimes I did commit, I escaped, the greatest of which was being an emancipated and independent woman in a world ruled by men.

How is it that a woman who for so many years got everything she wanted can be condemned to death for so little?

I look back at my life and realize that memory is a river, one that always runs backward.

The memories always win, and with them comes a demon that is even more terrifying than melancholy: remorse.

I don’t know if the future will remember me, but if it does, may it never see me as a victim, but as someone who moved forward with courage, fearlessly paying the price she had to pay.

On one of my trips to Vienna I met a gentleman who had become a roaring success in Austria among men and women alike. He was called Freud—I can’t remember his first name—and people adored him because he had restored the possibility that we are all innocent. Our faults were actually those of our parents.

existence, they will live life bitter and die. “So you must learn to follow your destiny, whatever it may be, with joy. As flowers grow, they show off their beauty and are appreciated by all; then, after they die, they leave their seeds so that others may continue God’s work.”

“Flowers teach us that nothing is permanent: not their beauty, not even the fact that they will inevitably wilt, because they will still give new seeds. Remember this when you feel joy, pain, or sadness. Everything passes, grows old, dies, and is reborn.”

“I’m afraid of Margaretha. Have you noticed how the other officers look at her? She could leave me at any moment.” It was this sick logic, one that turns men afraid of losing someone into monsters, that made him grow even worse.

Now I had only my daughter, a house that was always empty, a husband who never took me anywhere for fear of being betrayed, and a city so beautiful it felt oppressive; here I was in paradise, living my own personal hell.

Paris was always my preferred destination; I would never leave them to think of me as a swindler.

Unlike the Calvinists of my country, the French had a reputation for being completely and utterly liberated.

Everyone flirts with danger, so long as that danger does not really exist.

“My first piece of advice is the hardest, and it has nothing to do with your performance. Never fall in love. Love is a poison. Once you fall in love, you lose control over your life—your heart and mind belong to someone else. Your existence is threatened. You start to do everything to hold on to your loved one and lose all sense of danger. Love, that inexplicable and dangerous thing, sweeps everything you are from the face of the earth and, in its place, leaves only what your beloved wants you to be.”

“Everything in this world has two sides. People who were abandoned by the cruel god called love are also culpable, because they look into the past and wonder why they made so many plans for the future. But if they searched their memories even more, they would remember the day the seed was planted, and how they tended it, fertilized it, and let it grow until it became a tree that could never be uprooted.”

When we don’t know where life is taking us, we are never lost.

“Know what you want and try to go beyond your own expectations. Improve your dancing, practice a lot, and set a very high goal, one that will be difficult to achieve. Because that is an artist’s mission: to go beyond one’s limits. An artist who desires very little and achieves it has failed in life.”

“It took me four years to learn how to paint like a Renaissance master and my entire life to go back to drawing like a child. There’s the real secret: children’s drawings. What you’re seeing may seem childish, but it represents what’s most important in art.”

Unfortunately, I have no one else in whom to confide. We all know I won’t be killed because of this stupid allegation of espionage, but because I decided to be who I always dreamed. And the price of a dream is always high.

The most beautiful melody in the world will become a monstrosity if the strings are out of tune.

“A prostitute, yes. A spy, never!”

“Sin was not created by God; it was created by us when we tried to transform what was inevitable into something subjective. We ceased to see the whole and came to see just one part; and that part is loaded with guilt, rules, good versus evil, and each side thinking it’s right.”

The caged bird may sing of freedom, but it will still live in prison. Thea agreed to live in the cage, then wanted to escape, but no one helped, because no one understood.

Men think God is a mathematician, but He is not. If anything, God would be a chess player, anticipating His opponent’s next move and preparing His strategy to defeat him.

In a war, the first casualty is human dignity.

You thought innocence was enough to extract you from the web of the legal system on which we have always prided ourselves, but that in these times of war has become an aberration of justice.

Love is an act of faith and its face should always be covered in mystery. Every moment should be lived with feeling and emotion because if we try to decipher it and understand it, the magic disappears. We follow its winding and luminous paths, we let ourselves go to the highest peak or the deepest seas, but we trust in the hand that leads us. If we do not allow ourselves to be frightened, we will always awaken in a palace; if we fear the steps that will be required by love and want it to reveal everything to us, the result is that we will be left with nothing.

Love does not obey anyone and will betray those who try to decipher its mystery.