Life is Measured in Pages

“[This] is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child’s game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining” Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (via thetolkiengeek)

“The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was abut dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually — their paths were laid that way, as you put it but I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on — and not all Tia good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same — like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best takes to get landed in! I wonder what sort of tale we’ve fallen into?” Samwise Gamgee via J.R.R. Tolkien
The Two Towers, Book 4

“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, The Two Towers

“Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed in rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.” J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“Alas for us all! And for all that walk the world in these after-days. For such is the way of it: to find and lose, as it seems to those whose boat is on the running stream” Legolas, J. R. R. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring

“We live now upon an island amid many perils, and our hands are more often upon the bowstring than upon the harp” Haldir from The Fellowship of the Ring

“As Sam, the last of the Company, led Bill up on dry ground on the far side, there came a soft sound: a swish, followed by a plop, as if a fish has disturbed the still surface of the water. Turning quickly they saw ripples, black-edges with shadow in the waning light: great rings were widening outwards from a point far out in the lake. There was a bubbling noise, and then silence. The dusk deepened, and the last gleams of the sunset were veiled in cloud” J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Fellowship of the Ring”

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens” J. R. R. Tolkien (Gimli in FOTR)

“It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighted, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.” J. R. R. Tolkien