I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language. — J. R. R. Tolkien Copy Share Image
Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world. — J. R. R. Tolkien Copy Share Image
I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me. — J. R. R. Tolkien Copy Share Image
No half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly. — J. R. R. Tolkien Copy Share Image
If you don't know where you're going, you'll wind up somewhere else. Not all those who wander are lost. — J. R. R. Tolkien Copy Share Image
The enemy? His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he came from. And… — J. R. R. Tolkien Copy Share Image
Much of the same sort of degraded and filthy talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt,… — J. R. R. Tolkien Copy Share Image
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. — J. R. R. Tolkien Copy Share Image
Many are the strange chances of the world, and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter. — J. R. R. Tolkien Copy Share Image
If you're going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you'll never make a map of it afterwards. — J. R. R. Tolkien Copy Share Image
