Great Throughts Treasury

"If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"I'm in the business of providing people with secondary satisfactions. It wouldn't have done me much good if they had all written their own plays, would it?" - 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." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

"I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

"Life implies constant activity, and the vital principle was accordingly regarded as something essentially active, constantly controlling and therefore interfering with physical tendencies towards disintegration of organic structure, and building up new organic structure in the process of nutrition and reproduction." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

"The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilizations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

"The future will be no primrose path. It will have its own problems. Some will be the secular problems of the past, giant flowers of evil blossoming at last to their own destruction. Others will be wholly new." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

"A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"All have their worth and each contributes to the worth of the others." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"And suddenly first one and then another began to sing as they played, deep-throated singing of the dwarves in the deep places of their ancient homes; and this is like a fragment of their song, if it can be like their song without their music... As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns. Suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up - probably somebody lighting a wood-fire-and he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He shuddered; and very quickly he was plain Mr. Baggins of Bag-End, Under-Hill, again. He got up trembling." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"And thus it came to pass that the Silmarils found their long homes: one in the airs of heaven, and one in the fires of the heart of the world, and one in the deep waters." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Dead men are not friends to living men, and give them no gifts." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Death never comes at the right time, despite what mortals believe. Death always comes like a thief." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!" - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Here ends the Silmarillion. If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred; and if any change shall come and the Marring be amended, Manw‰ and Varda may know; but they have not revealed it, and it is not declared in the dooms of Mandos." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien