Laura Van Nice

“If you wanted to go on from the end of The Hobbit I think the ring would be your inevitable choice as the link. If then you wanted a large tale, the Ring would at once acquire a capital letter; and the Dark Lord would immediately appear. As he did, unasked, on the hearth at Bag End as soon as I came to that point. So the essential Quest started at once. But I met a lot of things along the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner of the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than Frodo did. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlorien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there.

-- (J.R.R. Tolkien to W.H. Auden, June 7, 1955.)”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

“There was no success that could make me more worthy of the gift. And no failure that could take it away.”
― Virginia Carmichael, All The Blue of Heaven

“Of the six million species on the planet, only man makes language. Words. What's more--in evidence of the Divine--we string those symbols together and then write them down, where they take on a life of their own and breathe outside of us. Story is the bandage of the broken. Sutures of the shattered. The tappestry upon which we write our lives. Upon which we lay the bodies of our dying and the about-to-come-to-life. And if it's honest, true, hind nothing, revealing all, then it is a raging river and those who ride it find they have something to give--that they are not yet empty.”
― Charles Martin, Unwritten

“If you think beauty insipid, you haven't experienced it. Nor is it always devoid of suffering. That's something religious artists have always understood, Michelangelo, Chagall, and Van Gogh, Beethoven, C.S. Lewis, and all the writer's for whom beauty is a gift and a calling.”
― Kristen Heitzmann, Told You So