Paulo Coelho Quotes

Was there another life she was meant to be living? At times she felt a keen certainty that there was ― a phantom life, taunting her from just out of reach. A sense would come over her while she was drawing or walking, and once while she was dancing slow and close with Kaz, that she was supposed to be doing something else with her hands, with her legs, with her body. Something else. Something else. Something else.

In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats

I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.

I did a weird thing when I was about 24. For four years I had written quite a lot of poetry, and I started reading through it and thought some of it was really good. So I burnt it all.

I believe that a dream un-followed turns into all kinds of bad things in the lives of those who don't pursue them.

It doesn't matter what I'm doing - I wish it was something else. If I'm producing, I wish I was directing. If I'm directing, I wish I was doing almost anything else!

Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.

I have to stop watching the Olympics. It just reminds me that I forgot to try really hard at something.

Many a blessing has been recognized too late.

Oh, the secret life of man and woman--dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest.

When I look at myself, I don't see the man I wanted to be.

He felt as though he were failing in practically every area of his life. Lately, happiness seemed as distant and unattainable to him as space travel. He hadn't always felt this way. There had been a long period of time during which he remembered being very happy. But things change. People change. Change was one of the inevitable laws of nature, exacting its toll on people's lives. Mistakes are made, regrets form, and all that was left were repercussions that made something as simple as rising from the bed seem almost laborious.

He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd even bothered.

When my father passed, I was still an unsuccessful cook with a drug problem. I was in my mid-thirties, standing behind an oyster bar, cracking clams for a living when he died. So, he never saw me complete a book or achieve anything of note. I would have liked to have shared this with him.

If, of all words of tongue and pen, The saddest are, It might have been,' More sad are these we daily see: 'It is, but hadn't ought to be!'

I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind.... It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know.

If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret and never ever did anything about it, I would be lying there saying, 'You just blew your entire life.'

In one split second I saw everything I could be, everything I want to be. And all that I'm not.

You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.

Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another.

My life is in denial. And when I die, baptized in eternal fire, I'll shed many tears.

What would be awful would be to die and look back miserably - seeing only the bad things, the opportunities missed, or what could have been.

Men and women aren't really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent.