J. R. R. Tolkien

The way is shut. It was made by those who are Dead, and the Dead keep it, until the time comes. The way is shut.

How do you pick up the threads of an old life? 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...that have taken hold.

Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

I warn you, if you bore me, I shall take my revenge.

Where there's life there's hope, and need of vittles.

Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.

The only just literary critic," he concluded, "is Christ, who admires more than does any man the gifts He Himself has bestowed.

Yes, I am here. And you are lucky to be here too after all the absurd things you've done since you left home.

That's the only place in all the lands we've ever heard of that we don't want to see any closer; and that's the one place we're trying to get to! And that's just where we can't get, nohow.

I will not walk backward in life.

Oft hope is born when all is forlorn.

And he sang to them, now in the Elven tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.

That is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, is say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world.

Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising I came singing into the sun, sword unsheathing. To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!