This is an excerpt from Eat Pray Love, written by Liz Gilbert. One of the most amazing books that have touch my bookshelf this year. Spiritually enlightening. The movie doesn’t do it justice at all. To be frank, the movie is an embarrassment to the book.

Nonetheless, it still remains an excellent read for any individual.

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I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all these acquisitions and accomplishments they run you down in the end. Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time - when pursued like a  bandit – will behave like one; always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you’re banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won’t. You have to admit that you can’t catch it. That you’re not supposed to catch it. At some point, as Richard keeps telling me, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you.

Letting go, of course, is a scary enterprise for those of us who believe that the world revolves only because it has a handle on the top of it which we personally turn, and that if we were to drop this handle for even a moment, well – that would be the end of the universe. But try dropping it, Groceries. This is the message I’m getting. Sit quietly for now and cease your relentless participation. Watch what happens. The birds do not crash dead out of the sky in mid-flight, after all. The trees do not wither and die, the rivers do not run read with blood. Life continues to go on. Even the Italian post office will keep limping along, doing its own thing without you – why are you so sure that your micromanagement of every moment in this whole world is so essential? Why don’t you let it be?

I hear this argument and it appeals to me. I believe in it, intellectually. I really do. But then I wonder – with all my restless yearning, with all my hyped-up fervor and with this stupidly hungry nature of mine – what should I do with my energy instead?

That answers arrives, too:

Look for God, suggests my Guru. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.

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My Funeral By Paulo Coelho
An Excerpt from “Like The Flowing River”

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The journalist from The Mail on Sunday appears at my hotel in London and asks one simple question: “If you were to die today, what kind of funeral would you like?”
The truth is that the idea of death has been with me everyday since 1986, when I walked the Road to Santiago. Up until then, I had always been terrified at the thought that, one day, everything would end; but on one of the stages of that pilgrimage, I performed an exercise that consisted in experiencing what it felt like to be buried alive. It was such an intense experience that I lost all fear, and afterwards saw death as my daily companion, who is always by my side, saying: “I will touch you, but you don’t know when. Therefore live life as intensely as you can.”
Because of this, I never leave until tomorrow what I can do or experience today- and that includes joys, work obligations, saying I’m sorry if I feel I’ve offended someone, and contemplation of the present moment as if it were my last. I can remember many occasions when I have smelled the last perfume of death: that far-off day in 1974, in Aterro do Flamengo (Rio de Janeiro), where the taxi I was traveling in was blocked by another car, and a group of armed paramilitaries jumped out and put a hood over my head. Even though they assured me that nothing bad would happen to me, I was convinced that I was about to become another of the military regime’s “disappeared”.
Or when, in August 1989, I got lost on a climb in the Pyrenees. I looked around at the mountains bare of snow and vegetation, thought that I wouldn’t have the strength to go back, and concluded that my body would not be found until the following summer. Finally, after wandering around for many hours, I managed to find a track that led me to a remote village.
The journalist from The Mail on Sunday insists: but what would my funeral be like? Well, according to my will, there will be no funeral. I have decided to be cremated, and my wife will scatter my ashes in a place called El Cebrero in Spain- the place where I found my sword. Any unpublished manuscripts and typescripts will remain unpublished (I’m horrified at the number of “posthumous works” or “trunks full of papers” that writers’ heirs unscrupulously publish in order to make some money; if the authors chose not to publish these things while they were alive, their privacy should be respected). The sword that I found on the Road to Santiago will be thrown into the sea, and thus be returned to the place whence it came. And my money, along with the royalties that will continue to be received for another seventy years, will be devoted entirely to the charitable foundation I have set up.
“And what about your epitaph” asks the journalist. Well, since I’m going to be cremated, there won’t be a headstone on which to write an inscription, since my ashes will have been carried away on the wind. But if I had to choose a phrase, I would choose this: “He died while he was still alive.” That might seem a contradiction in terms; but I know a lot of people who have stopped living, even though they continue working and eating and carrying on with their usual social activities. They do everything on automatic pilot, unaware of the magic moments that each day brings with it, never stopping to think about the miracle of life, not understanding that the next minute could be their last on the face of the planet.
The journalist leaves, and I sit down at the computer and decide to write this. I know it’s not a topic anyone likes to think about, but I have a duty to my readers – to make them think about the important things in life. And death is possibly the most important thing. We are all walking towards death, but we never know when death will touch us and it is our duty, therefore, to look around us, to be grateful for each minute. But we should also be grateful to death, because it makes us think about the importance of each decision we take, or fail to take; it makes us stop doing anything that keeps us stuck in the category of the “living dead” and, instead, urges us to risk everything, to bet everything on those things we always dreamed of doing, because, whether we like it or not, the angel of death is waiting for us.

This excerpt is taken from A Return To Love, written by Marianne Williamson. A very insightful book.

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Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.

There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other
people won’t feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us.

It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

—Marianne Williamson—

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This is an excerpt from Mercy by Jodi Picoult. She is one of the best fiction authors I have read. I am not really someone who reads fiction, but I only read her books. I stop reading her books though. I find it too thought-provoking at times. I lent this book from the library to read it and this was one of those excerpts which really hit me to the core. I remembered reading this particular excerpt and stopped to reread it a few couple of times.

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Allie shrugged, but it was more like a shiver. Cam wouldn’t yell, he certainly wouldn’t threaten her, but he’d withdraw. He would think that she didn’t support him or believe in him, and because that hadn’t happened in the five years they’d been married, it could cut him to the quick. ‘It has nothing to do with you, Jamie, or what you did,’ Allie said slowly, carefully picking her way through her own words. ‘I just don’t want to hurt him.’

A smile stole across Jamie’s face, so completely transforming him that Allie would not have recognized him if she’d seen him on the street. ‘Then you’re the one.’

Allie blinked at him. “The one what?”

“The one who loves more.” He moved closer to the desk, and the handcuffs tapped against the metal edge as he inadvertently made gestures. “You know it’s never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It’s always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.”

“I’m the one like you,” Jamie said. ‘The one who fell first. The one who would do anything to keep it the way it was at the beginning.’

Allie felt the room closing in on her. She forced herself to her feet. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Seventy-thirty.”she replied.

“But you killed her.”

Jamie shook his head. ‘I loved her,’ he said quietly. “I loved her so much I let her go.”

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