Category: words

“Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or…”

“Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien, preface to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings.

“History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam…”

“History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam papers. It is not about judging the dead. It is about understanding the meaning of the past—to realize the whole evolving human story over centuries, not just our own lifetimes.”

- Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England.

“The UU Library is theoretically the largest in the universe or, indeed, any conceivable universe; it…”

“

The UU Library is theoretically the largest in the universe or, indeed, any conceivable universe; it has a diameter of about one hundred yards but, as far as we can determine, an infinite radius.  The presence of so much stored magic does to time and space what a hot iron does to a pound of butter, so that you may well encounter places where the floor is now the wall, the books have turned into small clay models of hedgehogs and you yourself appear to be a device for coring apples. Students will therefore find it convenient to stick to the routes marked with chalk and the occasional banana skin.

We must warn you that many students have cleverly worked out that since the Library does, somewhere, contain any book that will ever or could ever be written, their own doctoral thesis must be in there on some distant shelf.  This is true.  Setting out to find it is, however, an extremely unwise move.  We can assure you that, however long it takes, staying here and writing the damn thing is a lot easier in the end.

”

- Terry Pratchett & Stephen Briggs, The Ankh-Morpork Archives.

“I once asked my friends if they’d ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient…”

“I once asked my friends if they’d ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three-thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second-hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don’t know anything about them, but you feel the other person’s there, one friend told me. It’s like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow.”

- Helen Macdonald, H is For Hawk.

“‘But it is not your own Shire,’ said Gildor. ‘Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will…”

“‘But it is not your own Shire,’ said Gildor. ‘Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.’”

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.

“Soon after A Wizard of Earthsea came out in England it received a review in a science-fiction…”

“Soon after A Wizard of Earthsea came out in England it received a review in a science-fiction periodical which took the book to task for being “consolatory” and “reassuring”. Well, fair enough, I thought, if the consolation is false, if the reassurance is unwarranted; but are consolation and reassurance inherently false, unwarranted - foolish, soft, silly, childish - sentimental? Are we writers only to threaten, terrify, and depress our readers with our ruthless honesty: have we not as good a right to offer them whatever comfort we’ve come by honestly?”

- Ursula K. Le Guin, Q&A for The Guardian.

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much…”

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.

“Lying there among the trees, despite a learned wariness towards anthropomorphism, I find it hard not…”

“Lying there among the trees, despite a learned wariness towards anthropomorphism, I find it hard not to imagine these arboreal relations in terms of tenderness, generosity and even love: the respectful distance of their shy crowns, the kissing branches that have pleached with one another, the unseen connections forged by root and hyphae between seemingly distant trees. I remember something Louis de Bernières has written about a relationship that endured into old age: “we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.” […] I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings.”

- Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey.