894 Quotes by J.R.R. Tolkien

Don't trust your head, Samwise, it is not the best part of you.

Did he say:"Hullo,Pippin!This is a pleasant surprise!"?No,indeed!He said:"Get up,you tom-fool of a Took!Where,in the name of wonder,in all this ruin is Treebeard?I want him.Quick"-Pippin Took

The world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.

I will not give you counsel, saying do this, or do that. For not in doing or contriving, nor in choosing between this course and another, can I avail; but only in knowing what was and is, and in part also what shall be.

An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous.

A new character has come on the scene (I am sure I did not invent him, I did not even want him, though I like him, but there he came walking into the woods of Ithilien): Faramir, the brother of Boromir - and he is holding up the "catastrophe" by a lot of stuff about the history of Gondor and Rohan.

I am a Christian…so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.

Gil-galad was an Elven-king.Of him the harpers sadly sing:the last whose realm was fair and freebetween the Mountains and the Sea.His sword was long, his lance was keen,his shining helm afar was seen;the countless stars of heaven's fieldwere mirrored in his silver shield.But long ago he rode away,and where he dwelleth none can say;for into darkness fell his starin Mordor where the shadows are.

On their deathbed men will speak true, they say.