J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

Fantasy is a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.

I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.

The story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.

Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men.

In such 'fantasy', as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.

The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power.

In Paradise perchance the eye may stray from gazing upon everlasting Day to see the day-illumined, and renew from mirrored truth the likeness of the True. Then looking on the Blessed Land 'twill see that all is as it is, and yet made free: Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys, garden nor gardener, children nor their toys. Evil will not see, for evil lies not in God's picture but in crooked eyes, not in the source but in malicious choice, and not in sound but in the tuneless voice. In Paradise they no more look awry; and though they make anew, they make no lie. Be sure they still will make, not being dead, and poets shall have flames upon their head, and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall: there each shall choose for ever from the All.

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled with elves and goblins, though we dared to build gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sow the seeds of dragons, 'twas our right (used or misused). The right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we're made.

All wishes are not idle, nor in vain fulfilment we devise — for pain is pain, not for itself to be desired, but ill; or else to strive or to subdue the will alike were graceless; and of Evil this alone is deadly certain: Evil is.

The heart of man is not compound of lies, but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, and still recalls him. Though now long estranged, man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.

Yet trees are not 'trees', until so named and seen and never were so named, till those had been who speech's involuted breath unfurled, faint echo and dim picture of the world

[M]y friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, 'What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?' and gave the obvious answer: jailers.

I wish life was not so short," he thought. "Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about."