How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep.

The world was fair, the mountains tallIn Elder Days before the fall...

Oh! That was poetry!" said Pippin. "Do you really mean to start before the break of day?

Gandalf could be seen, glimmering in the gloom; he seemed small, and altogether alone: grey and bent, like a wizened tree before the onset of a storm.

Have you thought of an ending?""Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.""Oh, that won't do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?""It will do well, if it ever came to that.""Ah! And where will they live? That's what I often wonder.

But of bliss and glad life there is little to be said, before it ends; as works fair and wonderful while they still endure for eyes to see, are their own record, and only when they are in peril or broken for ever do they pass into song.

We set out to save the Shire, Sam and it has been saved - but not for me.

Thus came Aragorn son of Arathorn, Elessar, Isildur's heir, out of the Paths of the Dead, borne upon a wind from the sea to the kingdom of Gondor.

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.