The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.

If you took this thing on yourself, unwilling, at others' asking, then you have pity and honour from me. And I marvel at you: to keep it hid and not to use it. You are a new people and a new world to me. Are all your kin of like sort? Your land must be a realm of peace and content, and there must gardners be in high hounour.

Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.

What do you fear, lady?' he asked. 'A cage,' she said.

Every writer making a secondary world wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.

But it seems that the wind is setting East, and the withering of all Woods may be drawing near.

And if Sam considered himself lucky, Frodo knew he was more lucky himself; for there was not a hobbit in the Shire that was looked after with such care.