J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

The future is hidden by a dark impenetrable veil, and yet we struggle to pierce through it.

It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.

I see black light (his last words)

Cold be hand and heart and bone, and cold be sleep under stone: never more to wake on stony bed, never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead. In the black wind the stars shall die, and still on gold here let them lie, till the dark lord lifts his hand over dead sea and withered land.

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

That is what Alex is now: a shadow-boy

I was a shadow among shadows brooding over the fate of other shadows that I alone strove to summon up out of the all-pervading dusk.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

I'm an enigma, an unknown.

Sleep and Death, who are twin brothers.

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.

I turned back to my extracurricular study of death and disease. Because no matter what Grace thought, I knew that in Mercy Falls, it's never over

All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

She suffers according to the digits of my hate. I hear the filaments of alabaster. I would lie down with them and lift my madness off like a wig. I would lie outside in a room of wool and let the snow cover me. Paris white or flake white or argentine, all in the washbasin of my mouth, calling “Oh.” I am empty. I am witless. Death is here. There is no other settlement.

To remain mysterious, say little and do nothing.

The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hysterical laughter... the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever.

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.

Stars and shadows ain't good to see by.

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

The rest, is silence.

Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and silence.

By a route obscure and lonely Haunted by ill angels only, Where an eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule -- From a wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE, out of TIME.

Dear, beauteous death, the jewel of the just! Shining nowhere but in the dark; What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust, Could man outlook that mark!