Excerpt from Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho

"...Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because when it happens, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their lives thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control; and are somehow capable of substaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They made the other person responsible for all their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvellous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."