Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire dir. Mike Newell | 2005
Meg was Amy’s confidante and monitor, and by some strange attraction of opposites Jo was gentle Beth’s. To Jo alone did the shy child tell her thoughts, and over her big harum-scarum sister Beth unconsciously exercised more influence than anyone in the family. The two older girls were a great deal to one another, but each took one of the younger sisters into her keeping and watched over her in her own way, ‘playing mother’ they called it, and put their sisters in the places of discarded dolls with the maternal instinct of litte women. – Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott.
EMMA WATSON as Hermione Granger in Harry Potter Deathly Hallows Part 1 + 2
ladies we need to start frantically and obsessively reading books in less than 24 hours again..remember how happy we were
remember when it was safe® to go outside and you could throw on a coat and grab your bag and take the bus downtown and wander around the street, maybe dipping into a few bookstores along the street, as the sky got dark and the air got that little bite of chilliness into it and you could flip through all the notebooks and paperbacks and touch things and have a conversation with the vendor and see their entire face and then go sit in a cafe and drink coffee and eat a bagel, bumping into people but not minding bc it wasn’t like they could give you a deadly virus, and then go home all happy and rosy-cheeked without a care in the world? yea, me neither.
There is a phrase used to describe people, often strangers, as “ships passing in the night.” The phrase is meant to describe how fleeting the intersection of two lives can be, how briefly people we don’t know can flicker in and out of our lives.
But when I read about the Titanic, I think we can push the phrase further. Because sometimes, as you pass another ship in the night, you may hear a cry in the dark. A person in danger. A shout for help. Distress rockets and SOS signals wailing into the night. A stranger in crisis.
And in those fleeting moments as your ship passes theirs, you get to make the choice- are you the Californian, the closest ship to the Titanic, which saw the distress rockets and saw the lights on the horizon and sat and did nothing; or are you the Carpathia, turning on a dime, pushing all steam to the engines, racing to help?
We can not say for sure what caused the Californian to not help the Titanic in that night of crisis. Whether is was apathy or incompetence or fear, we don’t know.
But we know that every single soul who survived the Titanic survived because of the Carpathia. Because the crew and the passengers of that ship raced nearly 60 miles through ice fields above their maximum speed in the dead of night, readying life boats, readying triage, to pull them from the water.
So, yes, we are ships passing in the night, and when given the chance to turn away or do good, always err on the side of reckless compassion.
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2K CELEBRATION → 🎁 for @andysambrg ↳ pride & prejudice (2005) x taylor swift