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Middle-earth is our world. I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different.

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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Historian
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Literary Critic
Military Officer
Poet
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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
Middle
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Impossible
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The burned hand teaches best. After that, advice about fire goes to the heart.
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I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.
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It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterward were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.
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Fear nothing! Have peace until the morning! Heed no nightly noises!
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Now I know what a piece of bacon feels like when it is suddenly picked out of the pan on a fork and put back on the shelf! No you don't! he heard Dori answering, because the bacon knows that it will get back in the pan sooner or later and it is to be hoped we shan't. Also eagles aren't forks!
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For if joyful is the fountain that rises in the sun, its springs are in the wells of sorrow unfathomable at the foundations of the Earth.
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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.
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Green are the leaves I leave in Mirkwood.
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And its object is Art not power, sub-creation not domination and tyrannous re-forming of Creation.
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I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril.
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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.
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Far more often [than asking the question 'Is it true?'] they [children] have asked me: 'Was he good? Was he wicked?' That is, they were far more concerned to get the Right side and the Wrong side clear. For that is a question equally important in History and in Faerie.
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What do you fear, lady? [Aragorn] asked. A cage, [Éowyn] said. To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.
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There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as though a chink in the dark: light out of the past. It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice agin, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things.
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No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.
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Have you thought of an ending?' 'Yes , several, and all are dark and unpleasant,' said Frodo. 'Oh , that won't do!' said Bilbo. '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 comes to that,' said Frodo.
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One has personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.
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For we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.
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O Elbereth! Gilthoniel! We still remember, we who dwell In this far land beneath the trees. Thy starlight on the Western Seas.
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It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.
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