The Spy

by Paulo Coelho

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

“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.”

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.”

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

Suddenly, however, as I faced my wounds and scars, I began to feel stronger. My tears did not come from my eyes, but from a deeper, darker place in my heart, telling me a story that I didn’t even fully understand in a voice of its own.

he knew that my tears had drained everything out of me and buried it in the sand, where it must remain until the end of time.

But that meant living the rest of my life split in two: as a woman who could be anything and one who was never anything, one who wouldn’t have even a single story to tell her children and grandchildren.

but honesty has a way of dissolving lies.

Be who I am? How could I be true to myself if I didn’t even know exactly who I was?

I was not looking for happiness, but what the French called la vraie vie, a true life, with its moments of inexpressible beauty and deep depression, with its loyalties and betrayals, with its fears and moments of peace.

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.

I realized that I had always been a warrior, facing my battles without any bitterness; they were part of life.

Are we never to be able to see the true face of love? And I understand what the Greeks meant by this: 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.

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