When Santiago arrives at the city of Tangier in Morocco, he stops at a bar where he meets a young man who speaks Spanish. Santiago wants to pay the young man to serve as a guide to take him to the pyramids, but the young man takes his money and then vanishes in the busy market plaza.
The Thief (the Young Man) Quotes in The Alchemist
The The Alchemist quotes below are all either spoken by The Thief (the Young Man) or refer to The Thief (the Young Man). For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Note: all page numbers and citation info for the quotes below refer to the Harper One edition of The Alchemist published in 2014.
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Epilogue
Quotes
He thought of the many roads he had traveled, and of the strange way God had chosen to show him his treasure. If he hadn’t believed in the significance of recurrent dreams, he would not have met the Gypsy woman, the king, the thief, or…“Well, it’s a long list. But the path was written in the omens, and there was no way I could go wrong,” he said to himself.
Related Characters:
Santiago (speaker), Melchizedek (the Old Man), The Fortune-teller, The Thief (the Young Man)
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
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The Thief (the Young Man) Character Timeline in The Alchemist
The timeline below shows where the character The Thief (the Young Man) appears in The Alchemist. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part One
A young man approaches Santiago and speaks in Spanish. Santiago tells him that he needs to get to...
(full context)
...walk together through the busy streets of Tangier. Santiago never takes his eyes off the young man , who is holding his money, but suddenly the most beautiful sword he has ever...
(full context)
...of the bar had been angry because he had been trying to tell him the young man was a thief.
(full context)