We are plain quiet folk, and I have no use for adventures. Nasty, disturbing, and uncomfortable things.
J. R. R. TolkienWe all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.
J. R. R. TolkienI wish life was not so short. Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.
J. R. R. TolkienThey arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'.
J. R. R. Tolkien