Morning Glory

“There is a place called 'heaven' where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet... 55
Cecil Roth...himself came and called me at 10 to 7; so that I could go to Communion! It seemed like a fleeting glimpse of an unfallen world...the incursion of this gentle Jew, and his sombre glance at my rosary by my bed, settled it. 67
How stupid everything is!, and war multiplies the stupidity by 3 and its power by itself: so one's precious days are days are ruled by (3x)^2 when x=normal human crassitude (and that's bad enough). 73
Do 'ramble on'. Letters need not be only about exterior events (though all details are welcome). What you are thinking is just as important. 96
[H]e [Frodo] had... reached the conclusion that physical fighting is actually less ultimately good than most (good) men think it! Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat'-though it contains... some samples or glimpses of final victory. 255
I do not feel quite 'real' or whole, and in a sense there is no one to talk to...we had shared all joys and griefs, and all opinions (in agreement or otherwise), so that I still often find myself thinking 'I must tell E. about this'-then suddenly I feel like a castaway left on a barren island under a heedless sky... 416
The... Fellowes' Garden looks like the foreground of a pre-Raphaelite picture: blazing green starred like the Milky Way with blue anemones, purple/white/yellow crocuses, and final surprise, clouded-yellow, peacock, and tortoiseshell butterflies flitting about...I have a faint hope that perhaps you and your wife could soon pick a fine day and visit me. Excuse scrawl. 417
[I]f lit. teaches us anything at all, it is this: that we have in us an eternal element, free from care and fear, which can survey things that in 'life' we call evil with serenity (that is not...appreciating their quality, but without any disturbance of our spiritual equilibrium)...in some such way, we shall doubtless survey our own story when we know it (and a great deal more of the Whole Story). 126-127.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“[O]ne lives so much in the past when the future is all blank and dim. Recollection is the privilege of the aged rather than of youth because when one is young one is supposed to have definite things to look forward to all the time. 171”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“I can't of course remember," he told me in effect, "ex-actly what he said to me on that Sunday. It's difficult to summarise the intangible. Do you remember the two Karg.
Elert pieces that Sterndale Bennett played at the beginning of the service that afternoon? One of them, ' Clair de Lune, seemed to move him deeply. He said it reminded him of you in its coldness and the sense of aloofness from the world. He said that after talking with you in Fairfield it seemed ver strange to go and mix with the others in the chapel... I tok him that he loved you then. He said he didn't, but I cour see that that was merely a conventional answer. 118”
― Vera Brittain, Testament Of Youth

“We shall beat them," he said, " but they'll break our hearts first! 167”
― Vera Brittain, Testament Of Youth