Forgive, give them peace

 ''To forgive is an act of compassion. It's not done because people deserve it. It's done because they need it.''

Rupert Giles - Buffy the Vampires Slayer- Joss Whedon

Book of the Week

 A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to read the saga that has conquered the whole world: The Hunger Games. And I really loved it! I love strong women who fights, I like the revolutions, the situation of being against the wall, when your options are or cowardice or fight to death. In short, I like the stories whose plot seems to quote Che Guevara: ''I would rather die standing up to live on my knees''

  “What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to rill in and die for their entertainment?”

The Hunger Games trilogy takes place in an unspecified future time, in the totalitarian nation of Panem. The country consists of the wealthy Capitol, located in the Rocky Mountains, and twelve (formerly thirteen) poorer districts ruled by the Capitol. The Capitol is lavishly rich and technologically advanced, but the twelve districts are in varying states of poverty – the trilogy's narrator and protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, lives in District 12, the poorest region of Panem, formerly known as Appalachia, where people regularly die of starvation. As punishment for a past rebellion against the Capitol wherein twelve of the districts were defeated and the thirteenth supposedly destroyed, one boy and one girl from each of the twelve districts, between the ages of twelve and eighteen, are selected by lottery to participate in the "Hunger Games" on an annual basis. The Games are a televised event, with the participants, called "tributes", being forced to fight to the death in a dangerous public arena. The winning tribute and his/her home district is then rewarded with food, and supplies and riches. The purpose of the Hunger Games is to provide entertainment for the Capitol and to serve as a reminder to the Districts of the Capitol's power and lack of remorse.

Your inside makes your outside beautiful

''You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful — and then you actually talk to them and five minutes later they're as dull as a brick; but then there's other people. And you meet them and you think, "Not bad, they're okay," and when you get to know them ... their face just, sort of, becomes them, like their personality's written all over it, and they just — they turn into something so beautiful. ''

Amy Pond - Doctor Who

We're alone...

 “I'm old enough to know that a longer life isn't always a better one. In the end you just get tired. Tired of the struggle. Tired of losing everyone that matters to you. Tired of watching everything turn to dust. If you live long enough, Lazarus, the only certainty left is that you'll end up alone.”

Doctor Who

Life is the best teacher

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman

Unique in the Universe

 ''Hey, do you mind if I tell you a story? One you might not have heard?

 All the elements in your body were forged, many millions of years ago, in the heart of a far away star that exploded and died. That explosion scattered those elements across the desolations of deep space. After so, so many millions of years, these elements came together to form new stars and new planets. And on and on it went-- the elements came together and burst apart, forming shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings. Until eventually-- they came together to make you.

 You are unique in the universe. There is only one you and there will never be another.''

Doctor Who

You're wrong for me in the right way

  "We’re all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you’ve been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there’s no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems—the ones that make you truly who you are—that we’re ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the right wrong person—someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, “This is the problem I want to have.”

  I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.

  Let our scars fall in love."

Galway Kinnell

We have no control

“Poets often describe love as an emotion that we can't control, one that overwhelms logic and common sense. That's what it was like for me. I didn't plan on falling in love with you, and I doubt if you planned on falling in love with me. But once we met, it was clear that neither of us could control what was happening to us. We fell in love, despite our differences, and once we did, something rare and beautiful was created. For me, love like that has happened only once, and that's why every minute we spent together has been seared in my memory. I'll never forget a single moment of it.”

The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

Book of the Week

  I remember four years ago I saw, by chance, a book: Study in Scarlet. I had heard of Sherlock Holmes, superb detective, but had never ever read any book of Arthur Conan Doyle.  The book was very cheap, so it was the perfect time to meet Sherlock. I bought it, and I fell in love with Holmes.

  “It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it. If you were asked to prove that two and two made four, you might find some difficulty, and yet you are quite sure of the fact.''

  A Study in Scarlet was Sherlock Holmes' first outing into the literary world. Published in 1887 (after many rejections) it was an immediate success. Conan Doyle's quirky hero, with his cold deductive mind, violin playing and cocaine addiction, fascinated the reading public, and laid the foundation for the many Sherlock Holmes books and short stories that were to follow over the next three decades. In this first work, all the winning ingredient of a Holmes novel appear fully-formed: a murder, puzzling clues, evil villains, startling locations and an elegant, surprising solution provided in typical laconic style by the arch-sleuth himself.

Don't judge me, just love me

 “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

You have to live, you have to live

  "I don't want you forgetting how different our circumstaces are. If you die, and I live, there's no life for me at all back in District Twelve. You're my whole life." Peeta says. "I would never be happy again. It's different for you. I'm not saying it wouldn't be hard. But there are other people who'd make your life worth living."

"No one really needs me," he says, and there's no selfpity in his voice. It's true his family doesn't need him. They will mourn him, as will a handfull of friends. But they will get on.... I realise only one person will be damaged beyond repair if Peeta dies. Me.

"I do," I say. "I need you."

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

The Chosen One

''I've been alive a bit longer than you, and dead a lot longer than that. I've seen things you couldn't imagine, and done things I'd prefer you didn't. I don't exactly have a reputation for being a thinker; I follow my blood, which doesn't exactly rush in the direction of my brain. So I make a lot of mistakes. A lot of wrong bloody calls. A hundred plus years, and there's only one thing I've ever been sure of. You. Hey, look at me. I'm not asking you for anything. When I say I love you, it's not because I want you, or because I can't have you - it has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try... I've seen your kindness, and your strength, I've seen the best and the worst of you and I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are. You're a hell of a woman. You're the one, Buffy.''

Spike to Buffy in Touched

With a name that seems Elvish

 Elliðaey is one of the Westman Islands, located south of Iceland. The island is uninhabited, but has a large hunting lodge, constructed in 1953.

Book of the Week

 It's not an easy lecture, not because its narrative style, but because the confused, incoherent and wandering thoughts of the protagonist, Raskolnikov. It's not easy to understand, neither. I know people that the only thing they have taken from this novel is that the protagonist is stupid, which is sad, and even outrageous.
 As the title itself suggests, a crime is committed, and it is interesting to see what the punishment is. For me, the more interesting, and even instructive about human nature, element is why the Raskolnikov commits the crime, and how he tortured himself for it. His conscience makes him suffer, not for the lives he has taken, but because of his fear that the truth comes out.

"We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is." 

The poverty-stricken Raskolnikov, a talented student, devises a theory about extraordinary men being above the law, since in their brilliance they think “new thoughts” and so contribute to society. He then sets out to prove his theory by murdering a vile, cynical old pawnbroker and her sister. The act brings Raskolnikov into contact with his own buried conscience and with two characters — the deeply religious Sonia, who has endured great suffering, and Porfiry, the intelligent and discerning official who is charged with investigating the murder — both of whom compel Raskolnikov to feel the split in his nature. Dostoevsky provides readers with a suspenseful, penetrating psychological analysis that goes beyond the crime — which in the course of the novel demands drastic punishment — to reveal something about the human condition: The more we intellectualize, the more imprisoned we become.

I am his life as fully as he is mine

“I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest - blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character - perfect concord is the result.”

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

A window to Vinage

Jamie Campbell Bower in a video made by Un-Titled Projects

I don't know when it happened, but it did.

“I could not tell you if I loved you the first moment I saw you, or if it was the second or third or fourth. But I remember the first moment I looked at you walking toward me and realized that somehow the rest of the world seemed to vanish when I was with you.”

Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare

Books: Your friends

“I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.”

 Roald Dahl

Looking into your eyes... I find death

“There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.”

Charles Baudelaire

Souls for Sale

“A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.”

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón 

You have to learn to love

“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in. Let it come in. We think we don’t deserve love, we think if we let it in we’ll become too soft. But a wise man named Levin said it right. He said, “Love is the only rational act.”

Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom

Book of the Week

 The element that surprised me when I read this book, a few years ago, was the narrator of the story: death itself. I think the writer was right to tell the story from the point of view of death, after all,  there's no better narrator to tell a story set in World War II. Also liked how the writer gave humanity to the character's death, making the reader sympathize with it and feel sorry for it (priceless the last setence of the novel, my favorite,  wich manages to send chills down my spine).

“Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear.” 

 It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist: books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

You make me strong

“And now I’m looking at you,” he said, “and you’re asking me if I still want you, as if I could stop loving you. As if I would want to give up the thing that makes me stronger than anything else ever has. I never dared give much of myself to anyone before – bits of myself to the Lightwoods, to Isabelle and Alec, but it took years to do it – but, Clary, since the first time I saw you, I have belonged to you completely. I still do. If you want me.” 

City of Glass by Cassandra Clare 

Love attacks the reason

“The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I love her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.”

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

What's life without a little risk?

''It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might has well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.''

 

J. K. Rowling

The only true unconditional love

“When you look into your mother’s eyes, you know that is the purest love you can find on this earth.” 

For one more day by Mitch Albom 

The truth is too painful

“My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with the truth itself. What succor, what consolation is there in the truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.”

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Let me be myself

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Book of the Week

 I was sixteen when I read  Pride and Prejudice. It was the first Jane Austen novel I read and I fell completely in love with this author. Since then I've read everything she wrote.

"From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry."

 When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Mr Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Mr Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever.

Books make me feel I am not alone

“But you love books, then,” Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen.

“Oh, yes,” Lestat said. “Sometimes they are the only thing that keeps me alive.”

“What a strange thing to say at your age,” she laughed.

“No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer one hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved.”

                                       Blackwood Farm by Anne Rice

Every night I save you

 I'm a huge fan of Buffy since I was twelve, and Spike has always been my favorite character of the show.
Undoubtedly Spuffy is my favorite fictional couple.

  ''I do remember what I said. The promise... to protect her. If I'd done that... even if I didn't make it... you wouldn't have had to jump. But I want you to know I did save you. Not when it counted, of course, but, after that. Every night after that. I'd see it all again... I do something different. Faster or more clever, you know? Dozens of times, lots of different ways... Every night I save you.''

Spike  'After Life' -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Sonnet 43

 I just found this girl on youtube- +Pearls Of Wisdom - and I'm so grateful for all her videos. She'll be a lot on my blog from now, no doubt!
 A few days ago I shared with you How do I love thee by Elizabeth Barret Browning. Now, here's the poem read by a sweet voice that gives the delicacy and vulnerability own this confession of love. Because for me, Elizabeth doesn't declare her love, she confesses her love.

My wild heart bleeds with yours

“She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, “Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.”
 And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek.''

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

How can you feel without a heart?

“I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me. People feel with their hearts, Ellen, and since he has destroyed mine, I have not power to feel for him.”

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

You are my better self

“I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel. I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.”

 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

I will love you every step of the way

“I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it.

I will love you as a dagger loves a certain person’s back, and as a certain person loves to wear dagger proof tunics, and as a dagger proof tunic loves to go to a certain dry cleaning facility, and how a certain employee of a dry cleaning facility loves to stay up late with a pair of binoculars, watching a dagger factory for hours in the hopes of catching a burglar, and as a burglar loves sneaking up behind people with binoculars, suddenly realizing that she has left her dagger at home. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled.

I will love you until every fire is extinguised and until every home is rebuilt from the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziest of policemen. I will love until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try. I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where we once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively.

I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and now matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.” 

Lemony Snicket

Always ϟ

''Harry: Why are you here, all of you?

Lily: We never left.''

In good times... and in bad times

 This is the story of Loki (impossible not to know who he is, thanks to Marvel) and his wife, Sigyn.  According to Norse myth, Loki, ussing his sagacity, killed Baldr (Odin's son). When the gods found out the truth, they took Loki's children, Váli and Nari/Narfi, and changed Váli into a wolf who rips apart his brother. His guts were used to tie Loki to three stones: one under his shoulders, another under the kidneys, and the third under his knees. The guts turned to iron and the goddess Skaði placed a snake above Loki. His wife, refusing to leave him, decided to stay sitting next to him for all eternity.
 The myth says that she's holding a bowl all the time to catch the dripping venom from the snake, but when the bowl becomes full, she has to leave him to pour out the venom, and at that time the venom falls on Loki's face. The pain is so terrible that he cannot help shake violently, and causing tremors in the Earth.
 His punishment will last until the twilight of the gods, and Sigyn will stay with him to avoid as much suffering as possible... forever.

[Picture] Loki and Sigyn (1863) by Marten Eskil Winge

Let's go to our own world... Where we can be happy

“I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.” 

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Passion: the air we breathe

''Passion…it lies in all of us.

Sleeping. Waiting.

And though unwanted, unbidden…

It will stir..Open its jaws and howl.

It speaks to us, guides us.

Passion rules us all and we obey.

What other choice do we have?

Passion is the source of our finest moments.

The joy of love…the clarity of hatred..

and the ecstacy of grief.

It hurts sometimes more than we can bear.

If we could live without passion,

maybe we’d know some kind of peace.

But we would be hollow.

Empty rooms: shuttered and dank.

Without passion…

we’d be truly dead.''

Joss Whedon --- Buffy The Vampire Slayer

The Magic of Books

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield 

Human: the only animal capable of self-pity

''I never saw a wild thing

sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough

without ever having felt sorry for itself.''

Self-Pity by D.H. Lawrence