J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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The art of life is to show your hand.
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There are things I take sides about, like capital punishment, which it seems to me there is only one side about: it is evil. But there are two or three sides to sexual harassment, and the moment you get into particular cases, there is injustice in every conceivable direction. It's a mess.
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Life's full of lots of dream-stealers always telling you you need to do something more sensible. I think it doesn't matter what your dream is, just fight the dream-stealers and hold onto it.
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I'm not playing for other musicians. We're trying to reach the guy who works all day and wants to spend a buck at night. We'll keep him happy.
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I have an incomplete album that I want to finish. I have been thinking about the plan during my days in jail, I have sung rock n' roll for forty years. After jail, I will continue to rock n' roll.
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I often feel like not writing! Sometimes I overcome it by just sitting there until writing happens. Sometimes I don't write, because books often need periods of percolation.
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I met Gerhard Richter and Alighiero Boetti when I was a teenager, and I was really inspired by them. When Boetti died, I realized I only vaguely remembered so many things he told me. It was such a pity. Had I only recorded his voice, he would still be with me, and I could listen to it from time to time.
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I am extremely suspicious of dreams, apparitions and visions, both in literature and in films and plays. Perhaps it's because mental excesses of this sort smack too much of being 'arranged.'
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If I had a daughter, and some guy came home with her, I'd be on him like a hawk. When I meet people's parents, I know my place. It's not that hard.
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As long as I can contribute, I'll continue working.
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When you are romancing a woman in a relationship, it should be poetic. It should have layers.
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I've always been really active. I grew up playing sports, so I'm always shooting hoops or throwing the football with my friends. I'm super-active in that sense.
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I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.
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I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.
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As neither reason requires nor religion permits the contrary, every man living in or out of a state of civil society has a right peaceably and quietly to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience.
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The American family will fear less, our national security will be more assured, and we won‘t let the Venezuelas or Nigerias or the Saudi Arabias or the Irans jerk us around by the gas nozzle the way they are doing it now.
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The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
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There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.
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If I had Sirius FM and fire-breathing in a giant puppy dragon, I'd be golden.
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Love is worthless unless it acts out, unless it's expressed in deed and behavior.
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A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the fire again, or not, as the case may be.
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I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
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Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
