It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.
A friend of mine tells that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it.
My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.
My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself.
It gives me great pleasure, a good name. I always in writing start with a name. Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about normally.
I’ve always been impressed that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.
If you’re going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you’ll never make a map of it afterwards.
I have no help to send, therefore I must go myself.
I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones...
Trolls are slow in the uptake, and mighty suspicious about anything new to them.
Venice seemed incredibly lovely, elvishly lovely – to me like a dream of Old Gondor, or Pelargir of the Numenorean Ships, before the return of the Shadow.
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory.
There are many powers in the world, for good or for evil. Some are greater than I am. Against some I have not yet been measured. But my time is coming.
Touching your cap to the Squire may be damn bad for the Squire, but it’s damn good for you.
There was a willow hanging over the mill-pool and I learned to climb it. It belonged to a butcher on the Stratford Road, I think. One day they cut it down. They didn’t do anything with it: the log just lay there. I never forgot that.
Great heart will not be denied.
Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?
Many evil things there are that your strong walls and bright swords do not stay.
He told them tales of bees and flowers, the ways of trees, and the strange creatures of the Forest, about the evil things and the good things, things friendly and things unfriendly, cruel things and kind things, and secrets hidden under brambles.
Not all that have fallen are vanquished.