J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

The way is shut. Then they halted and looked at him and saw that he lived still; but he did not look at them. The way is shut, his voice said again. It was made by those who are Dead, and the Dead keep it, until the time comes. The way is shut.

First, shut your gates.

No Entry' is close to my heart.

I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

I feel the only way I'm going to be successful in moving on is if I keep a separation.

When someone won't let you in, eventually you stop knocking.

There are no unlockable doors.

When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with.

Forgiveness is the only way to heal

What on earth would a man do with himself, if something did not stand in his way?

I won’t tell you how I managed to break in, since I don’t want the authorities figuring out, but let’s just say that if you’re going to make a gate, make sure it reaches all the way to the ground.

They hammered on the outer gate and called, but there was at first no answer; and then to their surprise someone blew a horn, and the lights in the windows went out. A voice shouted in the dark: 'Who's that? Be off! You can't come in. Can't you read the notice: No admittance between sundown and sunrise?' 'Of course we can't read the notice in the dark,' Sam shouted back. 'And if hobbits of the Shire are to be kept out in the wet on a night like this, I'll tear down your notice when I find it.

Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.

I turn and I slowly walk away and I don't look back. It has always been a fault of mine, but it is the way I am. I never look back. Never.

Anything that immobilizes you, gets in your way, or keeps you from your goals is all yours. You can throw it away anytime you choose.

Get out of my way; for I won't stop for you.

I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.

There is not one obstacle standing in the way of your success anymore.

You were her way here, and it's a dangerous thing to be a door.

Harder to get in than out, like so little else.

How can you give a man a room in a house and not let him come through the front door?

Only cops and vampires have to have an invitation to enter.

The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

The easiest way to solve a mystery is to decide that there is no mystery to solve.

Sometimes the past needed to stay buried; it was the only way you could move on. And sometimes you had to dig it up, because that too was the only way.