By Paulo Coelho
Near Olite, in Spain, there is a ruined castle. I decide to visit the place and as I am standing there before it, a man at the door says:
‘You can’t come in.’
My intuition tells me that he is saying this for the pure pleasure of saying ‘No’. I explain that I’ve come a long way, I try offering him a tip, I try being nice, I point out that this is, after all, a ruined castle…suddenly, going into that castle has become very important to me.
‘You can’t come in,’ the man says again.
There is only one alternative: to carry on and see if he will physically prevent me from going in. I walk towards the door. He looks at me, but does nothing.
As I am leaving, two other tourists arrive and they too walk in. The old man does not try to stop them. I feel as if, thanks to my resistance, the old man has decided to stop inventing ridiculous rules. Sometimes the world asks us to fight for things we do not understand and whose significance we will never discover.
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Like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”! :-D We must insisting! ;-) Ciao Paulo, one kiss from Trieste (Italy)
This entry resonates a part of By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (when Pilar and her friend visited that church). :-)
Dearest Paulo,
there are no words to describe how much i am taken by your novels. in every novel there is a paragraph or a quotation that helps me discover a new meaning in my life or understand something that happened to me.in every novel there lies its own magic and spell, yet its very realistic.unfortunaly i read the novels in arabic, my mother tongue, but i hope that one day i can learn portoguese and read them in thier original script.
all the time i used to read for you, i was thinking that you are as marvellous as my favorite arabic novelis, naguib mahfouz, then i was so astonished that you have already visited him in cairo and spent some time there. cant tell you how much this meant for me, it was like my 2 favorite authores of all times ever combined together.
so far i have read most of the novels but not Virnoica decide to die and the worrier of light, i think they havent been translated yet.
dearest paulo, i consider you a “walli” of GOD, thats an expression, from sofism actually, that i think best translated as a saint and a true faithful man of GOD.
best regards,
hafsa from an arabic land
So let’s fight for that we all know…
our soul.
Love
Hildegarde
Dearest Paulo,
i really loved this story. Its so often that we feel the need to do strange little things that seem insignificant at the time. Fact of the matter is, the manner in which the world works, there was a reason for it. Even though we may not know it, we should have faith in this sequence and go with our instincts.
Thank you for being
Yajna