J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

When the foot of the' mountain is enveloped in mist, the mountain appears to us much loftier than it is; so also when the ground and basis of a disaster is not clear to us.

And there are no stars and that you're never really sure who's doing what and what voice is what and, you know what I mean? It's supposed to be quite elusive.

If I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.

For my part, it was Greek to me.

I spend a substantial amount of my time endeavoring to fend off questions, and worry terribly that I might end up being too clear.

Well they are all working but don’t ask me what they are doing.

I find it very interesting to keep people uncertain about what is what and figure it out as they go.

It's a murky world out there, and it's hard to figure things out sometimes.

Were all the letters sun, I could not see one.

Oh, I don't know, you know, don't you know?

Things have been a mess for so many years that trying to pin down a starting point is like trying to figure out where your skin starts.

In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.

Adolescence is like having only enough light to see the step directly in front of you.

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.

Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.

I think that's what people most always do with the stuff they can't make out - just forget it.

I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.

The more mysterious, the more imperfect: that which is mystically spoken is but half spoken.

. . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing

She was standing in the airport of Copenhagen, staring at a doorway, trying to figure out if it was (a) a bathroom and (b) what kind of bathroom it was. The door merely said H. Was she an H? Was H "hers"? It could just as easily be "his". Or "Helicopter Room: Not a Bathroom at All

After a while it sort of began to rain, which is to say that it was the kind of rain that never comes to a decision about whether it's actually raining or not. Driving in it, you would never have been certain whether or not to turn on your wipers.

Took me a while to get to the point today, but that is because I did not know what the point was when I started.

Is that clear?" said Borcht "as clear as pea soup" I said

Please don't ask me what the score is. I'm not even sure what the game is.

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.