User Profile

Layout based on aswefly_graphix from freelayouts.
Scans for layout from tenimyuenorondo.

Listen, touch magic and pass it on. - Jane Yolen

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot. - Neil Gaiman, "Sandman #19: A Midsummer Night's Dream"

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor. - Neil Gaiman

There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the Ogpu and the atomic bomb. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker......Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book. Nothing will persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel. For, of course, it wants to be a little frightened.
- C.S. Lewis "On Three Ways of Writing for Children"

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. - Rudyard Kipling

"Oh. You have a magic boy. Why didn't you say so?" The priest scratched his forehead beneath the white silk blindfold that covered his eyes. "Magnificent. I'll plant him in the fucking ground and grow a vine to an enchanted land beyond the clouds." - Father Chains, "The Lies of Locke Lamora" by Scott Lynch

“Some day, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I’m still around to see it.”
“Oh, please,” said Locke. “It’ll never happen.”
- Father Chains and Locke Lamora, "The Lies of Locke Lamora" by Scott Lynch

"I seldom fling children from towers to improve their health. Yes, I meant for him to die." - Jamie Lannister, "A Feast for Crows" by George R.R. Martin

"National identity is plastic. It is not something that is unchanging, or rooted in an unvarying sense of consciousness throughout history."
- Prof. J. Reilly, NMC378

"Where the fuck is fucking Niall?" - Rook, "Havemercy" by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett

On the night the scarlet horsemen took him away - from all he knew and all he might have known - the moon waxed full in Scorpio, sign of his birth, and as if by the hand of God its incandescence split the alpine valley sheer into that which was dark and that which was light, and the light lit the path of devils to his door.
- Prologue from "The Religion" by Tim Willocks


2. Is there a real life character on whom Tannhauser is based?

Tannhauser is one-of-a-kind. There was no single specific character. But I drew on the spirit of the many men of that age who embodied something of his courage and violence, his intellectual curiosity, his entrepreneurial spirit and daring, his ruthlessness and morality, his physical toughness. Even by Tannhauser's standards, there were real individuals who were more than his match. We all know the most famous of them - Magellan, Pizarro, Cortes, Hawkins, Drake, Montluc - but their fame can blind us to the reality of the lives that they actually lived, which were quite astounding in all these respects. No one alive even has the possibility of taking the kind of insane risks they took, or of enduring the same terrors and privations. La Valette, the knights' Grand Master, lived a life of danger and adventure that no movie would ever dare to film. And behind that handful of historically famous actors, there were, of course, thousands of men of the same bold stripe. In my view that's one reason why Shakespeare's characters are so enduring - he lived in and drew from an age when men had few inhibitions to their impulses, either noble or base, so his characters portray the fundamental elements of human nature. This is what most interests me.
So Tannhauser is an original but based on a way of living and an attitude to life which many real-life men embodied to the full. They had huge balls, as does Tannhauser, and as does the book.
- from an interview with Tim Willocks, author of "The Religion", for Random House Reader's Group (UK division)



I hail from Toronto, Canada, but I have relatives in many US states, England, Ireland, Malta, Australia, New Zealand and I think that's it. I am currently trying to trace all of those people but little of no information is here in Canada so I must travel! Which I will get around to doing after I finish university.
I am currently enrolled at the University of Toronto, studying for a specialist degree in history. And taking Japanese on the side ^_^
I want to be the first person in my family to set foot on Asian soil (namely Japan) and I plan on going there to teach in the JET program after I finish my BA. I have no idea what I'm going to do for graduate work yet. I am entertaining the idea of an MA in Children's Literature, or an MA in Information Sciences (to become a librarian) or even high school teaching, not sure yet.
The main love of my life is reading. I tend to write a lot of entries on books, things I've read, things I want to see written, things I absolutely hated. Children's Literature is a passion of mine, and the bible of my life is a book called "Touch Magic" by Jane Yolen.
Besides that, I am a total and completely obsessed FANGIRL!!!! XD This is all thanks to two of my closest and most loved friends (VK and EP) who got me interested in the many fandoms out there and introduced me to pretty kira kira Japanese men.
So basically this journal is about my fangirling, which happens a lot btw. I comment on anything and everything that pops into my head. Which can be weird, wacky, harsh, critical, silly, goofy, dorky, anything at all. But at least once in an entry I will mention a fandom. I am a writer by heart and by nature, so my entries are long, (some would say long winded) but that's me ^_^
Friend me/Add me if you want, I have no friending policy since anything I write about is open to anyone. I just like meeting new people ^_^

Friends (48):

Friend of (36):