adachin's Journal

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

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

Helen Keller could have seen what was coming, so why couldn't my parents? - from "The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate" by Jacqueline Kelly

Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia. - "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" by C.S. Lewis

Fairytales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. - from "Tremendous Trifles (1909), XVII: "The Red Angel"" by G.K. Chesterton
Or in other words, fairytales don’t tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairytales tell children that dragons can be killed.

"Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one." - Neil Gaiman

I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I’d include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you’ve escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in.
So no, they’re not escapist. They’re escape.
- Neil Gaiman, from his blog, http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/58745052541/on-escapism-rebloggable-by-request

Lucas laughed. So good. "It sounds like you know what you're talking about."
Mr. Powell raised an eyebrow. "I'm a librarian," he said. "I always know what I'm talking about." - from "Okay for Now" by Gary D. Schmidt

"No story lives unless someone wants to listen. The stories we love best do live in us forever. So whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home." - J.K. Rowling, speech given at the premiere of the eighth and final Harry Potter movie

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. - Oscar Wilde

"You want weapons? We're in a library! BOOKS! The best weapons in the world!" - Doctor Who

"I want to be an author when I grow up. Am I insane?"
"Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an author."
- fan question to author Neil Gaiman, August 2012,

That moment when you finish a book, look around, and realize that everyone is just carrying on with their lives as though you didn’t just experience emotional trauma at the hands of a paperback. (copied from Tumblr, but this is so me it's scary! source here: http://tmisource.tumblr.com/post/23161576218/that-moment-when-you-finish-a-book-look-around)

The best morals kids get from any book is just the capacity to empathize with other people, to care about the characters and their feelings. So you don’t have to write a preachy book to do that. You just have to make it a fun book with characters they care about, and they will become better people as a result. - Louis Sachar

"Both the oral and the literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphor."
- Jack Zipes, "Spells of Enchantment"

In magic man depends on his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes in a certain established order of nature on which he can surely count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends. When he discovers his mistake, when he recognises sadly that both the order of nature which he had assumed and the control which he had believed himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary, he ceases to rely on his own intelligence and his own unaided efforts, and throws himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind the veil of nature, to whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching powers which he once arrogated to himself. Thus in the acuter minds magic is gradually superseded by religion, which explains the succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the will, the passion, or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in kind, though vastly superior to him in power.
- Sir James George Frazer, "The Golden Bough", chapter 69 "Farewell to Nemi"

"I don't want to be a man, I want to be an angst-ridden teenager who can't confront his own inner demons and takes it out verbally on other people instead."
"Well you're doing a fantastic job."
- Jace and Luke, "City of Ashes" by Cassandra Clare (pg. 45)

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty....The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all. - C.S. Lewis

"Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit." - Neil Gaiman

"She's a librarian," Sim said. "They're not teachers; they don't give you half as much hassle. If there's a fire in the school and I've got to choose who I'm gonna save - a teacher or a librarian - the teacher's gonna burn every time." - from "Ostrich Boys" by Keith Gray (pg. 28)

Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am a happy victim of books.
- from tumblr (link: http://theindependentvigilante.tumblr.com/post/23179433479)

"My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn’t, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I’d be found in a corner. That was who I was…that was what I did. I was the kid with the book." - Neil Gaiman

"My mother asked me to give up books for Lent once. I was so quiet. She wanted to talk and interact more. Two days later, with me pressed up against the bathroom door and her inside, with forty-eight hours behind us of me being the noisiest person in a house full of… well, my siblings, who played ball indoors and ducked witches in bathtubs, with me reading off the back of cereal boxes and being like ‘POTASSIUM, interesting, let’s have a discussion!’, with me desperate to talk and joke and share ideas and act out stories, anything, anything… my mother begged me to go get my book. You cannot keep confined to one world a child who is used to being able to escape and adventure through thousands." - Sarah Rees Brennan

She looked straight ahead of her like a sleepwalker, and as she walked she lifted one of the flowers and remarked in an eerie voice: "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance: pray you, love, remember: and there is pansies, that's for thoughts. There's fennel for you, and columbines: There's rue for you: and here's some for me: We may call it herb of grace o'Sundays..." She floated out of earshot.
Mrs. Golding was obviously startled. Indeed, she seemed alarmed. Father looked at her uncomfortably. "My daughter Mona," he explained. "She's really quite sound mentally, in spite of appearances. It's simply that she has every intention of becoming the American Sarah Bernhardt, and lately we've had to put up with great doses of Ophelia. That's the Mad Scene you just saw," he added, perhaps unnecessarily.
Mrs. Golding was an understanding soul. She laughed till the tears came.
- "Then There Were Five" by Elizabeth Enright, pg. 205

"I’ve had librarians say to me, “People in my school don’t agree with homosexuality, so it’s difficult to have your book on the shelves.” Here’s the thing: Being gay is not an issue, it is an identity. It is not something that you can agree or disagree with. It is a fact, and must be defended and represented as a fact. To use another part of my identity as an example: if someone said to me, “I’m sorry, but we can’t carry that book because it’s so Jewish and some people in my school don’t agree with Jewish culture,” I would protest until I reached my last gasp. Prohibiting gay books is just as abhorrent…Discrimination is not a legitimate point of view. Silencing books silences the readers who need them most. And silencing these readers can have dire, tragic consequences. Never forget who these readers are. They are just as curious and anxious about life as any other teenager." - David Levithan, Supporting Gay Teen Literature

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

I always like seeing ladies in gowns, especially librarians. Librarians know how to wear gowns. - Neil Gaiman, "It’s Good to Be Gaiman: A Revealing Interview with Newbery Winner Neil Gaiman" from School Library Journal (January 2009)

"It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves." - Bertie Shakespeare Smith, "Eyes like Stars" by Lisa Mantchev

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies," said Jojen, "The man who never reads lives only one." - "A Dance with Dragons" by George R.R. Martin

"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato

There are 99 libraries in Toronto. There are 99 different ways of doing things. And they are all right. - my boss, Muriel Hart, Children's Librarian

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

"I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned"
Thomas Jefferson, third U.S. president, in a letter to William Short. 1801

"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 ^_^