“Esther, however, was the only woman who understood one very simple thing: in order to be able to find her, I first had to find myself.”

“Even if I were not able to find my sword, the pilgrimage along the Road to Santiago was going to help me to find myself.”

“Show me where there is life in the desert. Only those who can see such signs of life are able to find treasure.”

“But he was able to understand one thing: making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.”

“If what one finds is made of pure matter; it will never spoil. and one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing in return.”

“She thinks about the other prostitutes who work with her. She thinks about her mother and her friends. They all believe that man feels desire for only eleven minutes a day, and that they’ll pay a fortune for it. That’s not true; a man is also a woman; he wants to find someone, to give meaning to his life.”

“She wasn’t afraid of difficulties; what frightened her was being forced to choose one particular path.Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live and she was always thinking that, in future, she might regret the choices she made now.‘I’m afraid of committing myself,’ she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none.Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic dissappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pain, loss and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes in order not to see the bad things in life.”