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