Questions & Answers
What do you do in your spare time?
Since 2007, I have been a volunteer for the Hyde Street Pier historical interpretation
in San Francisco, have participated in the Angel Island historical timeline representing the Spanish-American War era
and World War I, and have been part of several Spanish-American War living history events in the San Francisco Bay Area.
What literary authors have inspired you?
Lord David Cecil, Gerald of Cymru, the Gawain Poet, William Langland, Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, Warnie Lewis,
Frank Herbert, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Anthony Trollope, Plato, Nikola Yonkov Vaptsarov, William Makepeace Thackeray
and Dante Alighieri.
What are your favourite books?
Best Overall: Apology (Plato), Piers Plowman (Langland)
Best Written: The Pearl (Gawain Poet), The Place of the Lion (Williams)
Most Diverting: Faerie Queene (Spenser), Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Most Personally Meaningful: Pendennis (Thackeray), The Death of Ivan Ilych (Tolstoy), The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis), Leaf by Niggle (Tolkien)
Most Exciting: Battle of Maldon, Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
Most Often Reread: Inferno (Dante), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
Most Philosophical: Dune Messiah (Herbert), The Figure of Beatrice (Williams)
Best History: Saxon Chronicles, The Histories of Giraldus Cambrensis
Most Romantic: Romaunt de la Rose (Chaucer), La Vita Nueva (Dante)
What music do you listen to?
I love the composers De Falla (Three Cornered Hat), Puccini (Turandot), Tchaikovsky (Swan Lake, Romeo & Juliet),
Gershwin (American in Paris), Copland (Rodeo, Symphony for the Common Man), Minkus (La Bayadere, Don Quixote),
Adolphe Adam (Giselle, Le Corsaire), Luigi Boccherini and Dvorzak. I also enjoy Soundtracks, particularly:
Amelie, Battlestar Galactica Re-imagined, Lord of the Rings, Master & Commander, and Sense & Sensibility.
What theatre productions do you like?
My favourite ballets are Le Corsaire, La Bayadere, Giselle, Spartacus, Othello (Lar Lubovitch), Ghosts (Christopher Wheeldon)
and Confetti (Melinda Bach). Favourite stage plays are The Price (Arthur Miller), Argonautica (Mary Zimmerman) and
Coriolanus (William Shakespeare/Earl of Oxford).
Are you a gamer?
Not seriously in many years. I used to play Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, Myst/Riven, and WoW. Currently I simply
dabble on Facebook with Kingdoms of Camelot (3 cities, lvl 58) or Dragon Age: Legends (Human Mage lvl 13) and
Aralon: Sword & Shadow (Elven Ranger lv 13) for iPad.
When was this web site opened?
The site started as Silivren.Net in June, 2002 to house my writings. It moved to ImaginationLane.Net in 2010.
The podcast portion of the site has been up since St Patrick's Day 2008. In 2011 I combined all my sites into
ImaginationLane.Net.
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Admired Quotes
"To walk in Time, perhaps, as men walk on long roads; or to survey it, as men may see
the world from a mountain, or the earth as a living map beneath... to see with eyes and
to hear with ears: to see the lie of old and even forgotten lands, to behold ancient men
walking, and hear their languages as they spoke them, in the days before the days, when
tongues of forgotten lineage were heard in kingdoms long fallen by the shores."
- J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lost Road)
"There is a tendency... to assume that because a man is ill-treated, he must be a good
fellow; in our indignation against the whole system, we unconsciously draw a false picture...
on whom we need in fact waste no sympathy."
- Warren Lewis (The Galleys of France)
"Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who
govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer
that machinery. When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to
your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according
to my principles."
- Frank Herbert (Children of Dune)
"All humans make mistakes, and all leaders are... but human."
- Leto II (Children of Dune Miniseries)
"After the firing squad - the worms.
Thus does the single logic go.
But in the storm we'll be with you,
My people, for we loved you so."
- Nikola Yonkov Vaptsarov
"The past might, even materially, exist; only man was not aware of it, time being, whatever else
it was, a necessity of his consciousness...but because [he] can only be sequentialy conscious...
must [he] hold that what is not communicated to consciousness does not exist? I think in a line -
but there is the potentiality of the plane...this perhaps was what great art was...
the sense of vastness in those small things was the vastness of all that had been felt in
the present."
- Lord Arglay (Many Dimensions)
"I do not believe that our God stalks darkly along the clouds, laying thousands low with
the arrows of death... but though I do not believe in exhibitions of God's anger, I do believe
in exhibitions of his mercy. When men by their folly and by the shortness of their vision have
brought upon themselves penalties which seem to be overwhelming, to which no end can be seen,
which would be overwhelming were no aid coming to us but our own, then God raises his hand,
not in anger, but in mercy, and by his wisdom does for us that for which our own wisdom has
been insufficient."
- Anthony Trollope (Castle Richmond)
"There was a man," remarked Captain Eliot, "who was sentenced to death for stealing a horse
from a common. He said to the judge, that he thought it hard to be hanged for stealing a horse
from a common; and the judge answered, 'You are not to be hanged for stealing a horse from a
common, but that others might not steal horses from commons.'"
"And do you find," asked Stephen, "that in fact horses are not daily stolen from commons? You
do not. Nor do I believe that you will make captains braver or wiser by hanging or shooting them
for cowardice or erroneous judgement. It should join the ordeal of the ploughshare, floating or
pricking to prove witchcraft, and judicial combat, among the relics of a Gothic past."
- The Mauritius Command
"He appears to know his Bible as well as he knows the Articles of War. I am no theologian, and I know little of the
tenents of these recent sects, except that they reject what they are pleased to call the abominable
superstition of the Mass, but as far as my experience goes, they are primarily concerned with ethics:
mysticism and the ancient pieties seem alien to them and to their respectable and sometimes splendid
modern buildings."
- Dr. Stephen Maturin (Desolation Island)
"A woman who's acquaintance he greatly valued had once remarked that it was foolish to reflect
on the past except where that past was agreeable: he did his best to observe the precent, but
it was not much use—a sense of bereavement would keep breaking in."
- Patrick O'Brian about Dr. Stephen Maturin (The Fortune of War)
"Every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't always soften
the bad things, but visa versa the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things or
make them unimportant."
- The 13th Doctor (Vincent & The Doctor)
"No idea...do what I do—hold tight and pretend it's a plan!"
- The 13th Doctor (The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe)
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