“Chess isn’t always competitive. Chess can also be beautiful. It was the board I noticed first. It’s an entire world of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it. I can dominate it. And it’s predictable, so if I get hurt, I only have myself to blame.”
Elizabeth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) in the superlative drama series The Queen’s Gambit (2019), which tells of an orphan’s rise through the ranks of the male-dominated world of chess in the 1950s and 60s.
Ki-taek: You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan. No plan at all. You know why? Because life cannot be planned. Look around you. Did you think these people made a plan to sleep in the sports hall with you? But here we are now, sleeping together on the floor. So, there’s no need for a plan. You can’t go wrong with no plans. We don’t need to make a plan for anything. It doesn’t matter what will happen next. Even if the country gets destroyed or sold out, nobody cares. Got it?
Song Kang-ho in the phenomenal dark comedy thriller Parasite (2019), that tells of a family’s scheme to infiltrate a rich family’s household. Made on a budget of the equivalent of just over $10m dollars, the South Korean film won four Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and has already made over $260m worldwide.
Forky: Why do I have to be a toy?
Woody: You have to understand, how lucky you are to belong to a child.
Tony Hale and Tom Hanks in Toy Story 4, which features the brand new character of Forky, a spork made out of trash. Have you seen it? Where would you rank it compared to the previous three?
You can’t start a fire without a spark
Taken from the song Dancing in the Dark by New Jersey’s finest Bruce Springsteen, from the iconic Born in the USA album (1984). Who doesn’t love Bruce? My favourite song of his will always be Secret Garden (with a soft spot for Thunder Road too), but had to add this to the set. Especially as it has such a great sax solo.
John Reid: So, tell me. What makes Queen any different from all of the other wannabe rockstars I meet?
Freddie Mercury: Tell you what it is, Mr. Reid. Now we’re four misfits who don’t belong together, we’re playing for the other misfits. They’re the outcasts, right at the back of the room. We’re pretty sure they don’t belong either. We belong to them.
Aiden Gillen and Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), the film biopic that tells of Freddie Mercury and his connection with the band Queen.
Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is.
As said by the elderly fisherman Santiago in the maritime novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952) by American literary giant Ernest Hemingway. Widely considered to be one of the all-time great works, it won Hemingway a Pulitzer Prize and was instrumental in gaining him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
Alex Raphael 