This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
After some time he felt for his pipe. It was not broken, and that was something. Then he felt for his pouch, and there was some tobacco in it, and that was something more. Then he felt for matches and he could not find any at all, and that shattered his hopes completely.
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
Criticism - however valid or intellectually engaging - tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require practice, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off).
Focus | Knowledge | Mind | Reason | Research | Unique | Work | Following |
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair! She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken; a slender Elf woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.
Government | Rights | Security | Government | Guilty |
J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly
We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in color and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.
J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly
I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.
Imagination | Knowledge | Light | Technology | Thinking |
J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly
No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith.
Joy | Light | Mind | Sense | Thinking | Thought | Time | Thought |
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
I have not been nourished by English Literature... for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer... I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh), and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright color, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ?mad?. . . but I don?t believe I am... I set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own.
Light |
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
It will not do to leave a live dragon out of your plans if you live near one.
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
GANDALF: 'I'm looking for someone to share in an adventure, and it's very difficult to find anyone.' BILBO: 'I should think so, in these parts. We're plain, quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things, they make you late for dinner.
Wisdom |