J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

I think that any time of great pain is a time of transformation, a fertile time to plant new seeds.

I believe we are most beautiful when we are constantly shedding our old selves and moving into new light.

All human beings have the ability to transform like a caterpillar emerging from its cocoon and taking to the sky.

A lot of people, when they say 'forgive and forget,' they think you completely wash your brain out and forget everything. That is not the concept. What I think is you forgive and you forget so you can transform your experiences, not necessarily forget them but transform them, so that they don't haunt you or handicap you or kill you.

In the last few years, losing my father, going through a divorce and not getting some jobs I really wanted, is making me a much more interesting person, I think. This all really does feel like a rebirth, a new chapter.

I guess I'm in a state of becoming. Even though I've had a full career and I've been around a long time, it's like dinosaurs are coming back. It's all new. I'm having to be on my own and seeing how exciting life can be now.

I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before. I was a man now.

You can be shattered, and then you can put yourself back together piece by piece. But what can happen over time is this: You wake up one day and realize that you have put yourself back together completely differently. That you are whole, finally, and strong - but you are now a different shape, a different size.

We all want to be renewed, don't we?

You can grow flowers from where dirt use to be.

May we all emerge from winter with our strength renewed and any unwanted pieces left under the ice.

In meditation, once you are gone in, you are gone in. Then, even when you resurrect you are a totally different person. The old personality is nowhere to be found. You have to start your life again from abc. You have to learn everything with fresh eyes, with a totally new heart. That's why meditation creates fear.

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.

One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

The spiritual path wrecks the body And afterwards restores it to health. It destroys the house to unearth the treasure, And with that treasure builds it better than before.

I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

The death of what's dead is the birth of what's living.

A lot of times, when I go back to books I loved when I was young, I don't quite understand what it was that I loved about them. Rereading 'The Secret Garden,' I felt a lot like Mary feels when she visits her garden.

When you overcome a profound loss, or there's some catalyst in your life that shifts everything, if you're able to take it in stride and heal, it can make for much more three-dimensional and empathetic people.

I used to believe that people are only born once, but now I feel I have been reborn, like I was given a new life. I see myself as a child, full of energy and hope.

I'm a beginning, not an end.

Sometimes you just have to let go of the old and trust that something better is going to take its place, even if it's scary to face change and the unknown.

When things are bad, it's the best time to reinvent yourself.

Cancer opens many doors. One of the most important is your heart.