J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

For the rest of my life I'll be thinking about that hamburger. I'll be sitting there at the counter, holding it in my hands with tears streaming down my cheeks. The waitress will be looking away because she doesn't like to see kids crying when they are eating hamburgers.

If you want to cut down a tree, it is no use to climb into its branches.

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

My last sunrise. That morning, I was not yet a vampire. And I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely; yet I do not think I remember any other sunrise before it.

Since I was cut from the reedbed I have made this crying sound. Anyone separated from someone he loves understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a Source longs to go back.

I don't think you can ever return, really.

The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.

For those of you who thought you'd be forgotten, The friends you've made will try their best, to make it so. Think of all the beauty that you left behind you. You can take it if you want it, and then let it go...

And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising our of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer--apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of times vicissitude.

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back

I don't think it is as much a human foible as it is a human curse that we cannot understand the beauty of a thing until it is gone.

Bob wasn't precisely a friend to me but... I was used to him. In a way he was family, the mouthy, annoying, irritable cousin who was always insulting you but who was definitely at Thanksgiving dinner. I had never considered the possibility that one day he might be something else.

I think part of a hero construct is overcoming loss, or being abandoned, or having to make your own way in the world.

This is the autumn of wonders, yet every day, every single day, I go back to that burned afternoon in August when T. Ray left. I go back to that one moment when I stood in the driveway with small rocks and clumps of dirt around my feet and looked back at the porch. And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street. They are the moons shining over me.

You think the dead we loved truly ever leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly in times of great trouble?

I lost you once, I think I can do it again.

No, I don’t live in heartache. I don’t cry myself to sleep or any of that. I am, I tell myself, over it. But I do feel a void, icky as that sounds. And—like it or not—I still think about her every single day.

They filled our lives so much, the films they were in made us laugh, think and cry. Through their work they shared a piece of our soul. We will miss them with the sadness with which we miss an old friend.

Perhaps that's how I should think of them, Polly thought, the troupe and Miss Snelgrove and Trot. And Sir Godfrey. Not as lost to her, but as removed to this moment in time for safekeeping.

I stare at the pile of discarded remnants and think of my mother. Did she touch that pillar there? Does her scent still linger in a fragment of glass or a splinter of wood? A terrible emptiness settles into my chest. No matter how much I go about living, there are always small reminders that make the loss fresh again.

I wonder whether she was sorry for leaving us behind.

I've never forgotten him. Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart. I still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of goodbye, without looking back even once. The pain is like an axe that chops my heart.

Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on shore.

I don't know what else to tell you. I often think how different my life would have been - how much happier - if you'd been a part of it. One day.

She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.