How To Save A Life
The Fray

Step one you say we need to talk
He walks you say sit down it's just a talk
He smiles politely back at you
You stare politely right on through
Some sort of window to your right
As he goes left and you stay right
Between the lines of fear and blame
You begin to wonder why you came

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

Let him know that you know best
Cause after all you do know best
Try to slip past his defense
Without granting innocence
Lay down a list of what is wrong
The things you've told him all along
And pray to God he hears you
And pray to God he hears you

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

As he begins to raise his voice
You lower yours and grant him one last choice
Drive until you lose the road
Or break with the ones you've followed
He will do one of two things
He will admit to everything
Or he'll say he's just not the same
And you'll begin to wonder why you came

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life
How to save a life
How to save a life

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life
How to save a life

"The people who suffer the most are those that do not know what they want."

-Ellen Pompeo as Meredith Grey in Grey's Anatomy

"Las pasiones son así, irracionales. Nos son dadas por algo superior que no vemos y nos gobierna".

-Salim en El síndrome de Ulises de Santiago Gamboa

"God doth have a sense of humor."

-Al Pacino as Lt. Col. Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman

Jacques-Louis David, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, 1799, Oil on canvas.
Louvre, Paris, France.

"David, the political activist, was imprisoned in 1794. He survived the political change, and while still in prison planned a return to history painting and started work on The Intervention of Sabine Women, a project that was to occupy him until 1799. This subject, from ancient Rome, was the aftermath of the rape of the Sabines when, to ensure the population growth of their city, Romulus and his Romans abducted the womenfolk of their neighbours, the Sabines. Three years passed before the Sabine men, led by Tatius, mounted a counterattack. For the first time in a history painting by David, the central figure is a woman, Hersilia, who forces herself between Romulus, her husband, on the right, and the Sabine Tatius, her father, on the left. Other women cling to the warriors and place themselves and their children between the opposing groups.

In this painting David contrasted the violence of the rape with the pacification of the intervention. The image of family conflict in the Sabines was a metaphor of the revolutionary process which had now culminated in peace and reconciliation. The painting was a tribute to Madame David, and a recognition of the power of women as peacemakers."

Source: Web Gallery of Art

"If a problem can be solved there is no use worrying about it. If it can't be solved, worrying will do no good."

-Dalai Lama in Seven Years in Tibet

You Could Be Happy
Snow Patrol

You could be happy
And I won't know
But you weren't happy
The day I watched you go

And all the things
That I wished I had not said
Are played on loops
Till it's madness in my head

Is it too late to remind you
How we were
But not our last days of silence
Screaming, blur

Most of what I remember
Makes me sure
I should have stopped you from walking
Out the door

You could be happy
I hope you are
You made me happier
Than I'd been by far

Somehow everything
I own smells of you
And for the tiniest moment
It's all not true

Do the things
That you always wanted to
Without me there to hold you back
Don't think, just do

More than anything
I want to see you go
Take a glorious bite
Out of the whole world

"Somos ángeles y demonios al mismo tiempo. No somos una sola persona, sino una contradicción, una complejidad de fuerzas que luchan dentro de nosotros".

"Somos cobardes y heroicos, santos y pecadores, buenos y malos. Todo depende de esa lucha de fuerzas".

-Maribel, alumna de Campo Elías, en Satanás de Mario Mendoza

"Risky thing, this nostalgia business."

-Wayne Riskedahl

Jan Vermeer, View of Delft, 1659-60, Oil on canvas.
The Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands.

"El destino no tenía buenos sentimientos"

-La lectora de Sergio Álvarez

"La verdad ha de darse envuelta al hombre en mieles. Ha de hacérsela risueña y amable, para que el hombre, seducido por su apariencia externa, se acerque a ella, y la oiga sin saber que la oye"

-Jose Martí

Siempre me quedará
Bebe

Cómo decir que me parte en mil
las esquinitas de mis huesos,
que han caído los esquemas de mi vida
ahora que todo era perfecto.
Y algo más que eso,
me sorbiste el seso y me decían del peso
de este cuerpecito mío
que se ha convertío en río.
de este cuerpecito mío
que se ha convertío en río.

Me cuesta abrir los ojos
y lo hago poco a poco,
no sea que aún te encuentre cerca.
Me guardo tu recuerdo
como el mejor secreto,
que dulce fue tenerte dentro.

Hay un trozo de luz
en esta oscuridad
para prestarme calma.
El tiempo todo calma,
la tempestad y la calma,
el tiempo todo calma,
la tempestad y la calma.

Siempre me quedará
la voz suave del mar,
volver a respirar la lluvia que caerá
sobre este cuerpo y mojará
la flor que crece en mi,
y volver a reír
y cada día un instante volver a pensar en ti.
En la voz suave del mar,
en volver a respirar la lluvia que caerá
sobre este cuerpo y mojará
la flor que crece en mi,
y volver a reír
y cada día un instante volver a pensar en ti.

Cómo decir que me parte en mil
las esquinitas de mis huesos,
que han caído los esquemas de mi vida
ahora que todo era perfecto.
Y algo más que eso,
me sorbiste el seso y me decían del peso
de este cuerpecito mío
que se ha convertío en río.

Siempre me quedará
la voz suave del mar,
volver a respirar la lluvia que caerá
sobre este cuerpo y mojará
la flor que crece en mi,
y volver a reír
y cada día un instante volver a pensar en ti.
En la voz suave del mar,
en volver a respirar la lluvia que caerá
sobre este cuerpo y mojará
la flor que crece en mi,
y volver a reír
y cada día un instante volver a pensar en ti.

"It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I'm all outta gum!"

-Roddy Piper

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793, Oil on canvas.
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium.

"This painting can be regarded as David's finest work, in which he has perfectly succeeded in immortalizing a contemporary political event as an image of social ideals. David's painting of Marat represents the peak of his involvement in the Revolution where invention, style, fervent belief and devotion combine to produce one of the most perfect examples of political painting. David presented the painting to the Convention on 14 November 1793.

Jean-Paul Marat saw himself as a friend of the people, he was a doctor of medicine and a physicist, and above all he was editor of the news-sheet Ami du peuple. He suffered from a skin disease and had to perform his business for the revolution in a soothing bath. This is where David shows him, in the moment after the pernicious murder by Charlotte Corday, a supporter of the aristocracy. David had seen his fellow party member and friend the day before. Under the impact of their personal friendship David created his painting "as if in a trance," as one of his pupils later reported.

David takes the viewer into Marat's private room, making him the witness of the moments immediately after the murder. Marat's head and arm have sunk down, but the dead hand still holds pen and paper. This snapshot of exactly the minute between the last breath and death in the bathroom had an immense impact at the time, and it still has the same effect today.

David has used a dark, immeasurable background to intensify the significance. The boldness of the high half of the room above the figure concentrates attention on the lowered head, and makes us all the more aware of the vacuum that has been created. The distribution of light here has been reversed from the usual practice, with dark above light. This is not only one of the most moving paintings of the time, but David has also created a secularised image of martyrdom. The painting has often, and rightly, been compared with Michelangelo's Pietà in Rome; in both the most striking element is the arm hanging down lifeless. Thus David has unobtrusively taken over the central image of martyrdom in Christianity to his image of Marat. Revolutionary and anti-religious as the painting of this period claimed to be, it is evident here that it very often had recourse to the iconography and pictorial vocabulary of the religious art of the past."

Source: Web Gallery of Art

"Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well."

-Josh Billings

Jan Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665, Oil on canvas.
The Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands.

"As this girl stares out at the viewer with liquid eyes and parted mouth, she radiates purity, captivating all the gaze upon her. Her soft, smooth skin is as unblemished as the surface of her large tear-drop shaped earring - like a vision emanating from the darkness, she belongs to not specific time or place. Her exotic turban, wrapping her head in crystalline blue, is surmounted by a striking yellow fabric that falls behind her shoulders, lending an air of mystery to the image."

-Aurthur Wheelock, Johannes Vermeer, with contributions by Albert Blankert , Ben Broos and Jorgen Wadum, Washington, 1995.

Chasing Cars
Snow Patrol

We'll do it all
Everything
On our own

We don't need
Anything
Or anyone

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

I don't quite know
How to say
How I feel

Those three words
Are said too much
They're not enough

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

Let's waste time
Chasing cars
Around our heads

I need your grace
To remind me
To find my own

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

All that I am
All that I ever was
Is here in your perfect eyes, they're all I can see

I don't know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things will never change for us at all

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

"Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be."

-Sayuri in Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

"If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it."

-Nobu Toshikazu in Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

Because of You
Kelly Clarkson

I will not make the same mistakes that you did
I will not let myself cause my heart so much misery
I will not break the way you did
You fell so hard
I've learned the hard way, to never let it get that far

Because of you
I never stray too far from the sidewalk
Because of you
I learned to play on the safe side
So I don't get hurt
Because of you
I find it hard to trust
Not only me, but everyone around me
Because of you
I am afraid

I lose my way
And it's not too long before you point it out
I cannot cry
Because I know that's weakness in your eyes
I'm forced to fake, a smile, a laugh
Every day of my life
My heart can't possibly break
When it wasn't even whole to start with

Because of you
I never stray too far from the sidewalk
Because of you
I learned to play on the safe side
So I don't get hurt
Because of you
I find it hard to trust
Not only me, but everyone around me
Because of you
I am afraid

I watched you die
I heard you cry
Every night in your sleep
I was so young
You should have known better than to lean on me
You never thought of anyone else
You just saw your pain
And now I cry
In the middle of the night
For the same damn thing

Because of you
I never stray too far from the sidewalk
Because of you
I learned to play on the safe side
So I don't get hurt
Because of you
I tried my hardest just to forget everything
Because of you
I don't know how to let anyone else in
Because of you
I'm ashamed of my life because it's empty
Because of you
I am afraid

Because of you
Because of you

"[S]ome people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they've simply heard of."

-Sayuri in Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden