Paulo Coelho Quotes

It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love. It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him. What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity. Now even that had flickered out.

To be bored to death is a form of suicide.

My own apathy is bone chilling.

I see people allowing their lives to diminish, to become shallow, so they can't enjoy the deep wells of experience. Maybe it's always been this way, when the heart tends to shut down. If only the heart shut down and there were no repercussions, it would be O.K., but when the heart shuts down, the whole system goes into a kind of despair that is intolerable.

She was just a shell of her former self, functioning and talking but hardly alive.

I was dead inside.

I said 'It can't go on' and he said 'No, it can't.' Honestly, I don't think I could have mattered less to him by then. But by then, nothing mattered to him.

We can't feel anything - all that's left inside us is dust.

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

I remember thinking I couldn't be bothered to feel any emotions any more.

I thought I was dead inside.

She wondered what she thought of herself, and came to the realization that she felt mostly indifference towards her entire life.

She passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and it accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

(Beth) "I don't care anymore." I turned my face up toward Heaven. "That's not my home anymore. You are.

It's difficult for me to be around anyone for longer than an hour. Love, death, elation, sorrow, I just don't care all that much about any of it. I am at this point, more of an observer/journalist.

Behind their eyes the hope was sickening and in many, dead. They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been.

One day, you don't feel like doing anything. Nothing interests you, everything bores you. Feel more and more empty inside, more and more dissatisfied with yourself and the world in general. Then even that feeling wears off, and you don't feel anything anymore. You become completely indifferent to what goes on around you... You forget how to laugh and cry - you're cold inside and incapable of loving anything or anyone... There's no going back... The disease has a name. It's called deadly tedium.

I want to be alone. Sympathies wasted on my hollow shell. I feel there's nothing left to fight for. No reason for a cause.

I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.

She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she'd realized those parts had left her and were not coming back.

Inside, my soul became so cold I hated everything. I even despised the sun, for I knew I would never be able to play in its warm presence. I cringed with hate whenever I heard other children laughing, as they played outside. My stomach coiled whenever I smelled food that was about to be served to somebody else, knowing it wasn't for me.

My life had come to a sudden stop. I was able to breathe, to eat, to drink, to sleep. I could not, indeed help doing so; but there was no real life in me.

It was not the house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all women, and yet I could not feel it.

Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me.