The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho

Well, usually I learn more from my sheep than from books.

In order to find the treasure, you will have to follow the omens. God has prepared a path for everyone to follow. You just have to read the omens that he left for you.

The old man pointed to a baker standing in his shop window at one corner of the plaza. When he was a child, that man wanted to travel, too. But he decided first to buy his bakery and put some money aside. When he's an old man, he's going to spend a month in Africa. He never realized that people are capable, at any time of their lives, of doing what they dream of.

It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.

At that moment, it seemed to him that time stood still, and the Soul of the World surged within him. When he looked into her dark eyes, and saw that her lips were poised between a laugh and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke--the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love. Something older than humanity, more ancient than the desert. Something that exerted the same force whenever two pairs of eyes met, as had theirs here at the well. She smiled, and that was certainly an omen--the omen he had been awaiting, without even knowing he was, for all his life. The omen he had sought to find with his sheep and in his books, in the crystals and in the silence of the desert.
He had been told by his parents and grandparents that he must fall in love and really know a person before becoming committed. But maybe people who felt that way had never learned the universal language. Because, when you know that language, it's easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it's in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one's dreams would have no meaning.

It's a future that was written so as to be altered.

Even though I complain sometimes, it said, It's because I'm the heart of a person, and people's hearts are that way. People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren't, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.

Why a revolver? he asked.
It helped me to trust in people, the Englishman answered.

No, he heard a voice on the wind say. If I had told you, you wouldn't have seen the pyramids. They're beautiful, aren't they?

I'm coming, Fatima.

Omens. Do you think it's an omen that I read this book after reading that book? Do you think one book would pose the question and another book--seemingly chosen at random and in ignorance--would provide the answer? Do you dare to believe that it is more than my mind forcing and welding connections where there weren't any before? I do.
The Alchemist reads like a child's book. It is because it's a child's life and takes place in a child's world. It makes you wonder what truth there really is, for all our blind talk, in the child-like. I am not asking idle questions, nor making flippant statements. I take these things seriously enough to walk. If you know what I mean by that, then you might be on the way yourself.
This is the story of dreams. This is the story of pursuing those dreams. You play, you win, you play, you lose, you play. But life is no gambling game. Life makes you shoot craps but it won't ever toss you a card and say that was the point.
Some apocryphal gospel quotes Jesus as saying: Life is a bridge, build no house upon it. There comes a time when we have to ask what it is we are reading and what it is that we are looking at. Are all these stories just lies? Do we believe the wily fox: Not that this ever really happened. It's only lies of poets, lies of poets, child. Not in accordance with nature." Are we finally ready to grow up? Or will we choose to deny stories and in that denial live in a fictional world? Who hasn't read Peter Pan. We get to choose whether this is Never Never Land or not. We get to decide whether we live in Never Never Land or have never been there. Which one will it be?