“Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”
―
―
“The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hirther Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwannaland, Lhasas, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be . At any rate it out to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. (leter 53)”
― The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
― The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
“A divine 'punishment’ is also a divine 'gift’, if accepted, since its object is ultimate blessing, and the supreme inventiveness of the Creator will make 'punishments’ (that is changes of design) produce a good not otherwise to be attained”
― The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
― The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
“The romantic chivalric tradition takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man's eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars.”
― The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
― The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
“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.)”
― The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
-- (J.R.R. Tolkien to W.H. Auden, June 7, 1955.)”
― The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
Todd’s 2025 Year in Books
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