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Life is rather above the measure of us all (save for a very few perhaps). We all need literature that is above our measure--though we may not have sufficient energy for it all the time.

J. R. R. Tolkien

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J. R. R. Tolkien
Age: 81 †
Born: 1892
Born: January 3
Died: 1973
Died: September 2
Author
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Military Officer
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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
John R. R. Tolkien
J-R-R Tolkien
Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
May
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Rather
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More quotes by J. R. R. Tolkien

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Let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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In one thing you have not changed, dear friend, said Aragorn: you still speak in riddles. What? In riddles? said Gandalf. No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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He used often to say there was only one Road that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say. 'You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!
J. R. R. Tolkien
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If you're referring to the incident with the dragon, I was barely involved. All I did was give your uncle a little nudge out of the door.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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If you mean you think it is my job to go into the secret passage first, O Thorin Thrain’s son Oakenshield, may your beard grow ever longer,” he said crossly, “say so at once and have done!
J. R. R. Tolkien
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Trolls simply detest the very sight of dwarves (uncooked).
J. R. R. Tolkien
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I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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If you took this thing on yourself, unwilling, at others' asking, then you have pity and honour from me. And I marvel at you: to keep it hid and not to use it. You are a new people and a new world to me. Are all your kin of like sort? Your land must be a realm of peace and content, and there must gardners be in high hounour.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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Let him go, you filth! Let him go! You will not touch him again!
J. R. R. Tolkien
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I have never had much confidence in my own work, and even now when I am assured (still much to my grateful surprise) that it has value for other people, I feel diffident, reluctant as it were to expose my world of imagination to possibly contemptuous eyes and ears.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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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.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more--remembering my own sins and follies and realize that men's hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep for not all tears are an evil.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to
J. R. R. Tolkien
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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.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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Trolls are slow in the uptake, and mighty suspicious about anything new to them.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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I am dreading the publication, for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.
J. R. R. Tolkien