J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

One of the first houses we lived in was like out of a fairy story. We had a stream that ran through our garden, and we played with the ducks - we locked them in my mum's office, and they pooed everywhere. It was crazy, picking blackberries and mushrooms, rabbits running through your legs.

I'm just a simple country girl.

Bread and football - that's how I grew up.

White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea! How simple and beautiful was life after all!

City people make most of the fuss about the charms of country life.

The older I get, the more I become an apple pie, sparkling cider kind of guy.

I grew up like a lot of country boys and girls do - amongst the pine trees, dirt roads, farms, mules and people who were real.

I'm an old-fashioned guy... I want to be an old man with a beer belly sitting on a porch, looking at a lake or something.

Weirdness is not my game. I'm just a square boy from Wisconsin.

I don't like technology and all that. I'm a farm boy. I would rather live in that time when you had to provide for your family. I don't know. I'm a country kid, so I don't like modern technology.

The 1950s would be my ideal decade because I'm actually very traditional; I enjoy being at home, and I'm a complete nester.

I'm a pretty uncomplicated person. I live a very simple life with my family and I enjoy very ordinary things.

My grandmother was content to sit in the back yard wearing her old, wide-brimmed summer hat and occasionally getting up to feed herself raspberries from the seemingly inexhaustible bushes.

We had nothing, no television, no radio, nothing to get in the way. We read by the streetlight at the top of the lane, and we acted out the stories.

I'm kind of a small-town girl.

I grew up in New Jersey and played sports and rode my bike around. It was a really nice time - kids didn't have cellphones then - and you knew everyone in the town.

At heart, I am a country girl who grew up in Devon.

I am in fact a hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated).

Now Momma's done away with the old black kettle she used to cook in when I was just littleAnd the door ain't sprung on her electric rangeThat little old farm and home we had it ain't there no more and that's too badFolks are doing away with the simple things.

The most conventional customs cling to the table. Farmers who wouldn't drive a horse too hard expect pie three times a day.

I will always approach life from a small-town vibe. It makes experiences more fantastical.

Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?

The old days were slower. People buttered their bread without guilt and sat down to dinner en famille.

The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.

The auld wife sat at her ivied door, (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese) A thing she had frequently done before; And her spectacles lay on her apron'd knees.