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I don't like allegories.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
So fair, so cold; like a morning of pale spring still clinging to winter's chill.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Elrond's house was perfect, whether you liked food or sleep or story-telling or singing (or reading), or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Merely to be there was a cure for weariness. ... Evil things did not come into the secret valley of Rivendell.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
And yet, Eomer, I say to you that she loves you more truly than me, for you she loves and knows; but in me she loves only a shadow and a thought: a hope of glory and great deeds, and lands far from the fields of Rohan.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today; for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
He stands not alone. You would die before your stroke fell.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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They say it is the first step that costs the effort. I do not find it so. I am sure I could write unlimited 'first chapters'. I have indeed written many.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Courage is found in unlikely places.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
And yet their wills did not yield, and they struggled on.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Where iss it, where iss it: my Precious, my Precious? It's ours, it is, and we wants it.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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A pen is to me as a beak is to a hen.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
I am in fact a hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food unrefrigerated.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
For a while they stood there, like men on the edge of a sleep where nightmare lurks, holding it off, though they know that they can only come to morning through the shadows.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Not all those who wander are lost.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow, Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the Master: His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
His rage passes description - the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
The original 'Hobbit' was never intended to have a sequel - Bilbo 'remained very happy to the end of his days and those were extraordinarily long': a sentence I find an almost insuperable obstacle to a satisfactory link.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
In October 1920 I went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, with a free commission to develop the linguistic side of a large and growing School of English Studies, in which no regular provision had as yet been made for the linguistic specialist.
J. R. R. Tolkien