W Somerset Maugham

"I have never pretended to be anything but a story teller. It has amused me to tell stories and I have told a great many. It is a misfortune for me that the telling of a story just for the sake of the story is not an activity that is in favour with the intelligentsia. In endeavour to bear my misfortunes with fortitude."

from Creatures of Circumstance, 1947

inuit poem

"when i was young everyday was the start of something new, and every evening ended with the splending dawn of a new day"

Somos livres

Ontem apenas
fomos a voz sufocada
dum povo a dizer não quero;
fomos os bobos-do-rei
mastigando desespero.

Ontem apenas
fomos o povo a chorar
na sarjeta dos que, à força,
ultrajaram e venderam
esta terra, hoje nossa.

Uma gaivota voava, voava,
asas de vento,
coração de mar.
Como ela, somos livres,
somos livres de voar.

Uma papoila crescia, crescia,
grito vermelho
num campo qualquer.
Como ela somos livres,
somos livres de crescer.

Uma criança dizia, dizia
"quando for grande
não vou combater".
Como ela, somos livres,
somos livres de dizer.

Somos um povo que cerra fileiras,
parte à conquista
do pão e da paz.
Somos livres, somos livres,
não voltaremos atrás.

Letra e música: Ermelinda Duarte

pormenores

Acredito que existe um espaço da nossa vida perfeitamente delimitado que não devemos nunca deixar invadir.

Winston Churchill

"o que espero senhores é que, depois de um razoável período de discussão, todo o mundo concorde comigo"

Sheppey*

Whatever good or bad fortune enters our life, in the end, we can not escape some aspects of our fate.

“Just before Sheppey dies, he says to Death:
- I wish now I'd gone down to the Isle of Sheppey when the doctor advised it. You wouldn't have thought of looking for me there.
Death replies:
- There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said: Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

* by William Somerset Maugham, 1933

William Somerset Maugham

"most people cannot see anything, but I can see what is in front of my nose with extreme clearness; the greatest writers can see through a brick wall. my vision is not so penetrating."

desperate housewives

"amizades improváveis acontecem todos os dias"

Dr House

"- O universo acerta sempre as suas contas.
- Acerta?
- Não, mas devia!"

preconceitos

e se... a tua melhor ideia nascesse na praia, enquanto usavas um bikini?

tornar-se-ia melhor se a tivesses enquanto usavas um fato?

Blinders

Carol Leifer, the comedienne and writer behind some of Jerry Seinfeld's biggest laughs, also got her first shot at the director's chair. She says she was "all over" this project.

"You know how they say squeaky wheel gets the grease? Call me Squeaky," Carol says. "This opportunity is so rare. To break into directing in Hollywood is almost impossible. And the catch 22 of it is if you want to direct, they'll say, 'What have you directed before?' So it's kind of a vicious cycle."

Blinders is the story about a woman looking for love in the big city. Carol says she loved the humor in the story. "What I loved about it was I have so many girlfriends who are single who complain about never meeting anybody, and they're smart and attractive and successful," Carol says. "And then you spend an afternoon with them and you see that people are flirting with them left and right and they're just not picking it up. They're just not open to it."

Alexa did so—but didn't get the outcome she expected. She was once on a subway in Berlin with her dog and noticed a guy who was "drop dead gorgeous" in front of her who also had a dog. He looked right at her and she flirted back. However, as it turns out, the man was blind and hadn't seen her carry out her brave new plan!

Orchids

"Just divorced and ready to live again. Cantankerous, tall, profane, affectionate 60-year-old has rewritten will to leave everything to the last woman I have breakfast with. If you're 21 or over but under 75, svelte, cuddly, can read and make a decent ham and cheese sandwich, don't mind waiting in hospital emergency rooms and enjoy a spontaneous lifestyle, you could be the lucky lady."

Alfred Molina and Katherine Waterston star in Orchids, the story of a woman who takes a risk, answers a personal ad and meets the man of her dreams.

"I was writing so, so much my whole life and just never showing it to anyone."*

"[The main character] is a photographer and then in one moment he asks her, are you any good? And she says, 'I don't know. I don't develop them.' And it was my way of just kind of purging that."*


* Bryce Dallas Howard

in "bom dia rio (posto 6)"... bossacucanova

"... bossa nova se ramificou em várias raízes, todas elas muito impotantes, para a nossa música, claro... mas de todas as raízes eu continuo gostando mais da primeira, que foi uma música sem preocupação nenhuma, política ou social, mas apenas com uma intensão... que era a de fazer uma música moderna e actual... como a que fazemos até hoje... e é assim que eu sinto a bossa nova..."

Dia Internacional da Mulher II

O dia 8 de Março é, desde 1975, comemorado pelas Nações Unidas como Dia Internacional da Mulher

Neste dia, do ano de 1857, as operárias têxteis de uma fábrica de Nova Iorque entraram em greve ocupando a fábrica, para reivindicarem a redução de um horário de mais de 16 horas por dia para 10 horas. Estas operárias, que recebiam menos de um terço do salário dos homens, foram fechadas na fábrica onde, entretanto, se declarara um incêndio, e cerca de 130 mulheres morreram queimadas.

Em 1903, profissionais liberais norte-americanas criaram a Women's Trade Union League. Esta associação tinha como principal objetivo ajudar todas as trabalhadoras a exigirem melhores condições de trabalho.

Em 1908, mais de 14 mil mulheres marcharam nas ruas de Nova Iorque: reivindicaram o mesmo que as operárias no ano de 1857, bem como o direito de voto. Caminhavam com o slogan "Pão e Rosas", em que o pão simbolizava a estabilidade econômica e as rosas uma melhor qualidade de vida.

Em 1910, numa conferência internacional de mulheres realizada na Dinamarca, foi decidido, em homenagem àquelas mulheres, comemorar o 8 de Março como "Dia Internacional da Mulher".

"the princess and the pea"*

Once upon a time there was a prince who wanted to marry a princess; but she would have to be a real princess.
He travelled all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted.
There were princesses enough, but it was difficult to find out whether they were real ones.
There was always something about them that was not as it should be.
So he came home again and was sad, for he would have liked very much to have a real princess.

One evening a terrible storm came on; there was thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in torrents.
Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old king went to open it.

It was a princess standing out there in front of the gate.
But, good gracious! What a sight the rain and the wind had made her look.
The water ran down from her hair and clothes; it ran down into the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels.
And yet she said that she was a real princess.

“Well, we’ll soon find that out,” thought the old queen.
But she said nothing, went into the bed-room, took all the bedding off the bedstead, and laid a pea on the bottom; then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on the pea, and then twenty eider-down beds on top of the mattresses.

On this the princess had to lie all night.
In the morning she was asked how she had slept.

“Oh, very badly!” said she. “I have scarcely closed my eyes all night. Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It’s horrible!”

Now they knew that she was a real princess because she had felt the pea right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down beds.

Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that.

So the prince took her for his wife, for now he knew that he had a real princess; and the pea was put in the museum, where it may still be seen, if no one has stolen it.

There, that is a true story.



in http://hca.gilead.org.il/princess.html


*by Hans Christian Andersen, 1835

Jack & Sarah (1995)

"She's not proper, she's not fitting, she's not British, but to Jack she's a breath of fresh air."

in "o gato malhado e a andorinha sinhá"*

"o mundo só vai prestar
para nele se viver
no dia em que a gente ver
um gato maltês casar
com uma alegre andorinha
saindo os dois a voar
o noivo e a sua noivinha
dom gato e dona andorinha."

trova e filosofia de Estevão da Escuna, poeta popular estabelecido no Mercado das Sete Portas, na Bahia


*de Jorge Amado

"Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen...

... é, sem sombra de dúvida, um dos maiores poetas portugueses contemporâneos – um nome que se transformou, em sinónimo de Poesia e de musa da própria poesia.
Sophia nasceu no Porto, em 1919 (6 de Novembro), no seio de uma família aristocrática. A sua infância e adolescência decorrem entre o Porto e Lisboa, onde cursou Filologia Clássica.
Após o casamento com o advogado e jornalista Francisco Sousa Tavares, fixa-se em Lisboa, passando a dividir a sua actividade entre a poesia e a actividade cívica, tendo sido notória activista contra o regime de Salazar. A sua poesia ergue-se como a voz da liberdade, especialmente em "O Livro Sexto".
Foi sócia fundadora da "Comissão Nacional de Socorro aos Presos Políticos"e a sua intervenção cívica foi uma constante, mesmo após a Revolução de Abril de 1974, tendo sido Deputada à Assembleia Constituinte pelo Partido Socialista.
Profundamente mediterrânica na sua tonalidade, a linguagem poética de Sophia de Mello Breyner denota, para além da sólida cultura clássica da autora e da sua paixão pela cultura grega, a pureza e a transparência da palavra na sua relação da linguagem com as coisas, a luminosidade de um mundo onde intelecto e ritmo se harmonizam na forma melódica, perfeita, do poema.
Luz, verticalidade e magia estão, aliás, sempre presentes na obra de Sophia, quer na obra poética, quer na importante obra para crianças que, inicialmente destinada aos seus cinco filhos, rapidamente se transformou em clássico da literatura infantil em Portugal, marcando sucessivas gerações de jovens leitores com títulos como "O Rapaz de Bronze", "A Fada Oriana" ou "A Menina do Mar". Sophia é ainda tradutora para português de obras de Claudel, Dante, Shakespeare e Eurípedes, tendo sido condecorada pelo governo italiano pela sua tradução de "O Purgatório"."


Retirado daqui: http://www.mulheres-ps20.ipp.pt/SophiaMBreyner.htm#Biografia

Porque*

Porque os outros se mascaram mas tu não
Porque os outros usam a virtude
Para comprar o que não tem perdão.
Porque os outros têm medo mas tu não.

Porque os outros são os túmulos caiados
Onde germina calada a podridão.
Porque os outros se calam mas tu não.

Porque os outros se compram e se vendem
E os seus gestos dão sempre dividendo.
Porque os outros são hábeis mas tu não.

Porque os outros vão à sombra dos abrigos
E tu vais de mãos dadas com os perigos.
Porque os outros calculam mas tu não.


* Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

prima ballerina

the leading woman dancer in a ballet company