Eleven minutes

by Paulo Coelho.

Eleven Minutes tells a story of a young girl who falls in love at the age of eleven and discovered that sex actually only takes eleven minutes.

In her odyssey of self-discovery, the girl has to choose between pursuing a part of darkness, sexual pleasure for its own sake, or risking everything to find her own 'inner light' and the possibility of sacred sex, sex in the context of love.

In this gripping and daring novel, Coelho sensitively explores the sacred nature of sex and love.
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Notable notes:

It is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone's mind is love.

Perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly.

In the search for happiness, however, we are all equal; none of us are happy.

"I have discovered the reason why a man pays for a woman; he wants to be happy.

"Everyone needs to earn money, but not everyone chooses to live on the margins of society.

More Experience, Earn Less: Prostitution isn't like other businesses: Beginners earn more and more experienced earn less. Prices went down as the woman's age went up.

Customer Satisfaction / Quality Management: "When your client comes, you must always groan as if you were having an orgasm too. That guarantees customer loyalty." But Why? "They're paying for their own satisfaction." "A man doesn't prove he's a man until he is made to believed that he can pleasure a woman. And if he can pleasure a prostitute, he'll think he's the best lover on the block; and he will start to admire his dick.

"Men are very strange": They can beat you up, shout at you, threaten you, and yet, they are scared to death of women really. Perhaps not the woman they married, but there's always one woman who frightens them and forces them to submit to her caprices.

For a night? Now come on, you're exaggerating. It's really only 45 minutes, and if you allow time for taking off clothes, making some phony gestures of affection, having a bit of banal conversation and getting dressed again, the amount of time spent actually having sex is about "Eleven Minutes."

Eleven Minutes! The world revolved around something that only too Eleven Minutes. When the moment came to go to bed with someone, Eleven Minutes later it was all over.

Civilization: Something was very wrong with civilization, and it wasn't the destruction of the Amazon, rainforest or the ozone layer, the death of the panda, cigarettes or prison conditions, as the newspapers would have it. It is precisely that thing: sex.

Men and women may withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness.

Freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly.

You can't mend a broken heart?: In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.

How can you mend a broken heart? In love, no one can harm anyone else; but I'm not sure when that love is lost thereafter.

Ownership & Possession: I am convinced that no one can loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. no one possesses anyone else. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever will finally come to realize that nothing really belongs to them.

Beauty is Money: So many pretty girls let themselves be seduced by the illusion of easy money, forgetting that, one day, they'll be old and will have missed out on meeting the love of their life. Beauty is like the wind; beauty, my dear, don't last.

Heart or Body or Both: Those who touched my heart failed to arouse my body, and those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart.

Don't Play-Play: When it comes to seduction, feelings and contracts, one should never play around.

Wisdom: "My dear, it's better to be unhappy with a rich man than happy with a poor man, and over there you'll have far more chances of becoming an unhappy rich woman.

"Love is tangible and measurable: "I didn't love your father at first, but money buys everything, even true love."

Exit Strategy: No one knows what life is in store for us, and it's always good to know where the emergency exit is.

Women want three things in life: adventure, money and a husband.

I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of pleasure and treasure. It's all a question of how I view my life.

Being young inevitably means making mistakes; that's what all drug addicts says too.Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone. From that point onwards, things change ... and what happens before - the attraction that brought them together - is impossible to explain and sustain.

Don't think how to do; Just do it: Not everything in life is a matter of what position you adopt when making love, and that any variation usually occurs naturally, without thinking, like the steps in a dance.

Wisdom of a woman: "I allowed myself to fall in love for a simple reason: I'm not expecting anything to come from it."

Love or make? "Everyone knows how to love; but not everyone understands how to make love; the majority of us have to re-learn because there is a connecting thread. Our bodies must learn to speak the language of the soul, known as sex, and that is what a woman can give to the man who gave her back her soul, even though he has no idea how important he is to her life. That is what he asked for, and that is what she would give."

No one can know how to humiliate another person if they themselves have not experience humiliation.

Wise man says: Human beings weren't made solely to go in search of wisdom, but also to plough the land, wait for rain, plant the wheat, harvest the grain, make the bread, and have sex.

Withholding the object of desire: Real love has nothing to do with imagination. We will discover it when a chain of events provoked by the energy engendered by love - courtship, engagement, marriage, children, waiting, more waiting, getting old, retirement, illnesses, the feelings that it is far too late.

Sexual energy comes into play before sex even takes place. The greatest pleasure isn't sex, but the excitement of the thoughts of it. And then you awaken desire by not immediately handing over the object of that desire.