Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write. - J.R.R. Tolkien
Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world. - J.R.R. Tolkien
No half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly. - J.R.R. Tolkien
Still round the corner there may wait / A new road or a secret gate / And though I oft have passed them by / A day will come at last when I / Shall take the hidden paths that run / West of the Moon, East of the Sun. - J.R.R. Tolkien
Such is often the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere. - J.R.R. Tolkien
The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out. - J.R.R. Tolkien
They say it is the first step that costs the effort. I do not find it so. I am sure I could write unlimited 'first chapters'. I have indeed written many. - J.R.R. Tolkien
You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have. - J.R.R. Tolkien
. . . these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang. - Herman Melville
At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a sharp, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. - Herman Melville
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. - Herman Melville
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